While previous research focused on social media and student-athletes, there is a lack of knowledge about positive functions of social media use for student-athletes, especially personal branding purposes. Thus, this study aimed to explore how student-athletes perceive and use social media for personal branding purposes. A total of 11 student-athletes at a Division I university participated in semi-structured interviews. Considering the exploratory nature of the study, a qualitative inquiry and a phenomenology approach were employed to grasp an overall understanding of student-athletes’ personal branding via social media. The self-presentation theory was adopted to help understand student-athletes’ use of social media. Emerging themes included benefits and barriers of social media use, social media strategies, and concerns about negative consequences of social media. Findings from this study shed light on the importance of increasing awareness and knowledge of the concept of personal branding via social media for student-athletes. These findings also call for more effective social media training or education programs that can foster student-athletes’ positive attitude toward social media use for personal branding.

Despite sport rebranding becoming an emerging topic for both academia and industry, there has been a limited number of investigations on how sport rebranding influences sport fans. The aim of this study is to investigate how sport rebranding in the form of logo redesign influences fan loyalty. Through an experimental approach, the results indicate that attitude toward rebranding plays a significant role in fan response when sport rebranding occurs. Additional findings suggest that logo evaluation partially mediates the relationship between logo change and brand loyalty. This study makes significant contributions to the body of knowledge on sport rebranding by revealing how fans’ attitudes toward rebranding affects brand loyalty. The proposed model suggests directions for future sport rebranding research, and the paper provides implications for how sport marketers can use various rebranding strategies to improve rebranding outcomes and diminish negative responses from sport fans.

Despite sport rebranding becoming an emerging topic for both academia and industry, there has been a limited number of investigations on how sport rebranding influences sport fans. The aim of this study is to investigate how sport rebranding in the form of logo redesign influences fan loyalty. Through an experimental approach, the results indicate that attitude toward rebranding plays a significant role in fan response when sport rebranding occurs. Additional findings suggest that logo evaluation partially mediates the relationship between logo change and brand loyalty. This study makes significant contributions to the body of knowledge on sport rebranding by revealing how fans’ attitudes toward rebranding affects brand loyalty. The proposed model suggests directions for future sport rebranding research, and the paper provides implications for how sport marketers can use various rebranding strategies to improve rebranding outcomes and diminish negative responses from sport fans.

PurposeDespite its growth, there has been a lack of investigation on how sport rebranding influences fans and their behaviors. This study sought to examine how a critical aspect of rebranding – logo redesign – influences fans' attitudes toward a sport brand and intent to purchase merchandise bearing the rebranded logo. More specifically, we aim to investigate the influence of varying degrees of logo change and fan identification in relation to brand attitude and purchase intention.Design/methodology/approachAn experimental design, 4 (degrees of logo change) × 2 (fan identification: low, high), was utilized with the sample of 277 participants. The current logo of the Ultimate Fighting Championship was redesigned into three fictitious rebranded logos as stimuli based on different rebranding types.FindingsThe results suggest that color change and revolutionary change generate the most negative attitudes from both high- and low-identified fans, and fan identification is not a significant factor influencing fan attitudes. Regarding purchase intention, low-identified fans are not significantly influenced by logo changes whereas highly identified fans showed similar response to their attitudes.Originality/valueThe findings advance the current body of knowledge on sport rebranding and fan behavior by demonstrating the effects of varying degrees of logo redesign and fan identification levels on brand attitude and purchase intention. Moreover, the current research has important implications for sport marketers on developing effective rebranding and logo redesign strategies.

Microcontrollers (MCUs) have been deployed on numerous IoT devices due to their compact sizes and low costs. MCUs are capable of capturing sensor data and processing them. However, due to their low computational power, applications processing sensor data with deep neural networks (DNNs) have been limited. In this paper, we propose MiCrowd, a floating population measurement system with a tiny DNNs running on MCUs since the data have essential value in urban planning and business. Moreover, MiCrowd addresses the following important challenges: (1) privacy issues, (2) communication costs, and (3) extreme resource constraints on MCUs. To tackle those challenges, we designed a lightweight crowd-counting deep neural network, named MiCrowdNet, which enables on-MCU inferences. In addition, our dataset is carefully chosen and completely re-labeled to train MiCrowdNet for counting people from an mobility view. Experiments show the effectiveness of MiCrowdNet and our relabeled dataset for accurate on-device crowd counting.