Thilo Kunkel

The Attractiveness of National and International Football Leagues: Perspectives of Fans of “Star Clubs” and “Underdogs”

Abstract The goal of this study is to determine what factors affect the attractiveness of both national football leagues and the Champions League from the perspective of fans, and how these factors are perceived by fans of clubs at the top and bottom of the league standing. This is of interest as there are differences between the financial resources available to the clubs and leagues. Based on a review of sport consumer behaviour literature, we propose that four determinants are relevant to a leagues attractiveness: stadium atmosphere, international success of the clubs, uniqueness of dominating clubs and perceived competitive balance. A total of 1,404 committed fans of 12 selected football teams from the English Premier League and German Bundesliga participated in the study. The research model was tested using partial least squares. The results show that the determinants significantly predict perceived attractiveness, and that even fans of financially privileged and successful clubs concede that perceived competitive balance is necessary for attractiveness to be maintained.

Sports spectator segmentation: examining the differing psychological connections among spectators of leagues and teams

The results from this study extend previous research by empirically testing the involvement based Psychological Continuum Model (PCM) segmentation procedure on sports spectators. To date, the procedure has only been verified using sports participants, although the PCM was developed with a broader range of sports consumers in mind. The validity of the procedure is confirmed using two online surveys, which gather data from spectators at both the league (n=761) and team (n=623) level. A three-step segmentation procedure then places respondents into the PCM stages - awareness, attraction, attachment and allegiance. ANOVA tests indicate that the four groups significantly differ from one another on attitudinal and behavioural measures for both league and team spectators. Findings suggest that the PCM is an appropriate framework to investigate fan development at both league and team levels. Thus sports marketers are provided with a research segmentation tool capable of helping them to better understand their heterogeneous consumer bases and thus guide marketing decisions.

Using Self-Categorization Theory to Uncover the Framing of the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games: A Cross-Cultural Comparison of Two National Newspapers

Research into the framing of the Olympic Games indicates that the media often exhibit bias in their coverage. Through discourse, the media attempt to create a situation where consumers are provided with multiple story lines or foci, to build and maintain audiences for the duration of an event. A content analysis was conducted to uncover and compare how two national broadsheet newspapers, one from Australia and one from Canada, pictorially depicted the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games. Results of this study found large differences in the use of home-nation content to capture, build, and maintain readers for the duration of the Olympic Games coverage. These findings are beneficial for sports managers and sports-media personnel to understand how two different nations pictorially framed the Olympic Games.

Gamified Consumer Engagement and Its Influence on Team Involvement over Time: An Abstract

Gamified digital media offers many benefits to organizations. The purpose of this research project was to investigate the motives of consuming a gamified sport team app and its influence on team involvement over time. Drawing on involvement, engagement, and motivation theory, two studies were conducted. In Study 1, quantitative data of 639 users of a gamified mobile application was examined. Paired sample t-tests indicate a significant increase of app users’ involvement mean score over the course of one soccer season. Subsequent linear regression analysis indicated a significant relationship between engagement related to generating knowledge (i.e., trivia questions) and the involvement difference between Time 1 and Time 2 explaining 6% of the variance of respondents’ increased involvement. In Study 2, qualitative interviews with 27 users of the application revealed four themes representing consumers’ motives for using the application – monetary rewards, competition, sense of achievement, and gaining knowledge. Additionally, the interviews explained the influence of the application on consumers’ involvement changes or the lack of changes. This research contributes to consumer behavior knowledge by examining the intrinsic and extrinsic motives that drive the consumption of a gamified application and its influence on consumer involvement with an organization.

Name It as a Sub-brand! Event Marketing from Brand Architecture Perspective: An Abstract

An emerging challenge for sport event organizers is to convince the city council to grant licenses for hosting events. One effective means is to empirically show how events could add value to the host city. Recent years have seen an increasing number of sport events that brand themselves through associating with a city brand. These events adopt the city name in the event name structure to establish the sub-brand—master brand relationship with the city brand. Based on the brand architecture framework, this study proposes a conceptual model to investigate the relationship between consumers’ perception of an event, as a sub-brand, and the image of a city, as the master brand, in the context of a regional sports event. Brand architecture is an organizing structure representing the relationship between brands in a brand portfolio (Aaker and Joachimsthaler, Calif Manage Rev 42(4):8–23, 2000). From a top-down perspective, researchers find that the image of the master brand could influence the extended brand (Volkner et al., J Serv Res 13(4):379–396, 2010). Yet it is important to investigate how image transfers from a bottom-up perspective since service brands are consumed at the sub-brand level.

Interview With Michael Lahoud, Professional Soccer Player: Lessons of Personal Athlete Branding via Social Media

Michael Lahoud is a professional soccer player who currently plays for Miami FC in the North American Soccer League (NASL). He was born in Sierra Leone, where he escaped civil war when he was 6 years old. As a refugee, soccer helped him integrate in the United States, where he was drafted as the ninth overall pick in the 2009 Major League Soccer (MLS) superdraft. He is a community advocate who uses his sport to support charitable efforts such as the Wall Las Memorias project, the NoH8 campaign, and Schools for Salone. He was the MLS Humanitarian of the Year in 2010, and, together with Kei Kamara, he is the recipient of the 2015 FIFPro World Players’ Union Merit Award (a prize worth

Brand architecture, drivers of consumer involvement, and brand loyalty with professional sport leagues and teams

25,000), which recognized their involvement in the Schools for Salone project that builds schools in their home country of Sierra Leone. His brand is Soccer can make a difference. This interview consists of two parts, with the first part being conducted in December 2015 when he was a player with the MLS team Philadelphia Union...