Brand Management Throughout Professional Athletes' Careers

Abstract

This paper examines how professional athletes can optimize commercial revenues from endorsement and sponsorship agreements throughout their careers. We use athlete brand management, defined as the balancing of brand building and brand selling activities, to understand the dynamics of commercial revenues optimization. We develop a conceptual framework that consists of two main blocks. First, we investigate four key determinants for the generation of athletes' accumulated commercial revenues. Second, we analyze appropriate brand management strategies at different stages of an athlete's life cycle. We propose a number of contingencies that refer to an athlete's characteristics, situation, and environment and argue that these contingencies determine the appropriate, i.e. revenues-optimizing, brand management strategy of an athlete at any career stage. Examples of professional athletes' brand management strategies support our framework. To our knowledge, this is the first paper to examine athletes' long-term commercial revenues optimization through athlete brand management.

Testing the impact of athlete brand image attributes on fan loyalty

“…In recent years, many studies deal with the measurement of athlete brand (Arai et al , 2014; Williams and Agyemang, 2014) and its role on fans loyalty in and outside of the geographic boundaries (Kerr and Gladden, 2008; Künzler and Poli, 2012) because athletes have become idols and cultural, personal and social symbols to their fans (Ilicic and Webster, 2014). Although athlete brand image has been noticed by sport marketing researchers in recent years (Arai et al , 2013, 2014; Hasaan et al , 2018; Schweizer and Dietl, 2015; Vaatainen and Dickenson, 2019; Williams and Agyemang, 2014; Kunkel et al , 2019; Na et al , 2020), athlete brand image management and empirical investigation of its outcomes have been often ignored in sports marketing literature. Following the assumption that the general measurement in structural equations is not comprehensive because researchers cannot measure differences and the sharing of hidden variables (Edwards, 2011; Lee and Cadogan, 2013), the current study confirmed the effects of three attributes of athlete brand image on fan loyalty construct.…”

“…Brand image refers to the customer’s understanding on a specific brand, which is reflected to their minds by the brand’s communications (Keller, 1993). The past studies indicate that athletic performance, athlete’s high attractiveness and positive off-field performance (namely, trust, lovely character and sociability) represent athlete brand image and lead to an increase in the brand equity (Grant et al , 2011; Schweizer and Dietl, 2015). In addition, it is deemed that athletes have the potential to become recognizable personalities outside of the sports environment.…”

“…The first attribute, athletic performance, refers to the athlete’s activities inside the field and an important aspect of athlete brand equity (Schweizer and Dietl, 2015). According to Arai et al (2013), the athletic performance consists of four dimensions (i.e.…”

Understanding athlete brand life cycle

“…It may also contribute to extending the athlete's brand lifetime, making it more profitable (Schweizer and Dietl 2015). Hamlin et al (2006) mentioned that each product has a certain lifespan and goes through different stages, including introduction, growth, maturity, and decline.…”

Athlete Brand Development in Social Media: Analysis of Students’ Attitudes

“…Athlete brand is associated with a unique name, appearance, and distinctive qualities that are recognisable and distinguishes the individual from other competitors in the market (Parmentier & Fischer, 2012;Schmidt, Shreffler, Hambrick, & Gordon, 2018). Arai et al (2014) define athlete brand as a public personality that associates its name, face, or other elements of the brand in the marketplace with symbolic meaning and value.…”