Retro marketing has become a staple in sport marketing practices. Teams and leagues are attempting to connect their fans to the past in a magnitude of ways. Despite the influx of retro marketing in sport, there has been no examination of it to date. This study examined the various usages of retro marketing in sport and through an inductive approach created a framework that categorized and broadly defined each usage. The five practical areas of retro marketing in sport were constructed: imagery, merchandising, venue, gameday promotions, and advertising. The authors shaped and framed retro marketing in sport through these five dimensions, as they encompassed the retro marketing practices examined and are often relied upon marketing elements. Further, the authors suggest multiple avenues for future research on this topic, including understanding a sport organization's usage of these practices and the impact they have on sport consumers.
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to expand our understanding of retro marketing in sport through the perspective of sport marketers.
Design/methodology/approach
Fourteen sport marketers involved in their team’s marketing and utilized retro participated in topical interviews. Interviews were transcribed and open coded to find themes around how retro marketing is utilized and why the marketers think it may be effective.
Findings
This study discovered prominent themes explaining how retro marketing is implemented (changing marks and jerseys, celebrating anniversaries, milestones and past players and retro nights) and why it may be effective (nostalgia, retro design appeal and connection to the team’s lived history).
Originality/value
Despite the coverage of retro marketing in popular press, little is understood in the academic field. This current study should expand our understanding of retro marketing in sport and be effective in aiding future scholars who investigate retro marketing in sport.
The current multi-study examination explored explicit and implicit appeal of a prominent form of retro sport marketing: retro team logos. Study 1 utilized the stimuli-organism-response framework to test preference differences between those offered team merchandise with a retro logo and those offered the same merchandise with the current logo. Statistically significant preference differences were not uncovered, yet it was found that previous exposure to the retro logo negatively impacted preference of the retro logo. Based on these results, Study 2 utilized an implicit association test to assess the style appeal of retro and current logos. This assessment, once again, found no difference in the explicit preference for the retro and current logos, yet an implicit bias of freshness toward the current logo and outdatedness toward the retro logo was found. Together, the results provide preliminary evidence of the ephemeral impact of retro team logos within a professional sports context.
Retro marketing in sport has been relied upon for years. Sport fans see more teams and leagues implement retro marketing and merchandise into marketing plans. Despite this, we have little understanding behind the success of retro marketing in sport. Therefore, this paper sought to gain a better understanding of the demographic characteristics of retro merchandise consumers and to examine the impact of two psychographic factors. Surveys collected from fans of various professional sport teams in the United States (N = 1,509), demonstrated novel findings. In this study retro merchandise was preferred overall, younger fans were more likely to prefer retro merchandise, and household income did not explain much of the preference. Most telling was that nostalgic proneness significantly and positively predicted a retro preference. The implications from this study should guide marketers in their usage of retro merchandise and marketing practices and lead to future practical research on the topic.
PurposeThe authors sought to examine how nostalgic feelings influenced purchase intentions of sport fans towards branded merchandise. Additionally, the goal was to test the childhood brand nostalgia (CBN) scale to see if it was an effective measure in this context. This was an important early step in understanding the way nostalgia may influence sport fan's merchandise preferences.Design/methodology/approachSurveys were completed by 601 fans of two professional sport teams in the USA. These consumers were targeted geographically through Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk) and half given a modern branded t-shirt and the other half a retro branded t-shirt. To examine brand nostalgia in this context, the CBN measure was evaluated and examined to see its impact on each group, using hierarchical regressions.FindingsThe results demonstrated that CBN positively impacted consumers purchase intentions in the retro logoed t-shirt group. However, in the modern logoed t-shirt group, CBN did not significantly influence purchase intentions.Practical implicationsThe findings of this study suggest that retro merchandise is working as expected, as it is attractive to those who feel nostalgic about their team. Secondarily, this study's findings suggest it may be vital for marketers to be conscious that their retro materials are connecting to the past.Originality/valueThis study was an early examination of a measure of nostalgia and its impact on purchase intentions in sport. The findings suggested that this CBN instrument may be appropriate in retro marketing research, especially regarding sport merchandise. Further, the findings suggest that nostalgic feelings may be influential toward retro merchandise, but not modern merchandise.
Haskell Indian Nations University is the sole 4-year intertribal university in America and their athletics department is called The Fightin’ Indians. Their logo and name seem to contradict most of the research describing the negative impacts of Native imagery. Interviews were conducted with current students at Haskell University to understand their feelings towards Native imagery overall. When exploring the usage of Native imagery by Haskell it was apparent the students felt as an all-Native institution there was a sense of ownership to utilize the imagery but were aware it misrepresented some Native people. The students also discussed how their imagery may influence outsiders’ perspectives. This study helps us understand a unique situation and should lead to future research around Native American imagery in sport.
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