Heather Jane Lawrence

Luxury suites and team selling in professional sport

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to provide a framework for team selling to sports firms that can be used to more effectively select members for sales and CRM teams and improve the performance of teams in attracting and retaining premium seating customers.Design/methodology/approach – The paper provides a two‐stage framework based on the personal selling process and the activities that support CRM programs. Recommendations are guided by the sport marketing and team selling literature streams and by best practices in sport marketing.Findings – The paper recommends the formation of two teams (personal selling and CRM) during the customer relationship cycle and provides guidelines for team member selection based on the critical activities that occur during the personal selling and CRM processes. Key success factors are provided, including the establishment of a customer‐focused organization and effective communication practices among team members and between selling teams.Originality/value – Although t...

Social identity and athlete identity among CrossFit members: an exploratory study on the CrossFit Open

ABSTRACT The exercise regime CrossFit is known for the strong community among members. Furthermore, CrossFit has positioned itself as a sport and labelled participants as athletes. CrossFit’s strong community and positioning strategy should have implications on members’ identity. Research on CrossFit is incipient and none has examined it from an identity perspective. This study therefore explored CrossFit participants’ social identity and athletic identity before and after members participated in CrossFit’s annual competition, the CrossFit Open. Thirty-four participants were recruited into a pre–post quasi-experimental design study. Social identity was high among members, athlete identity was modest and both measures were stable over time. Further analysis suggests that while some may identify as athletes, others do not. Thus by positioning CrossFit as a sport, divisions may be unintentionally created around role identity. This could have negative implications because if hierarchies develop, individual’s social identity may be challenged, which may ultimately harm the community.