Team Branding Enhancement: The Role of Player-Team Brand Personality Alignment in Team Evaluation and Brand Equity

Abstract

Although the primary purpose of signing players is to provide fans with the best on-field performance, players’ role in team branding is another important factor that needs to be considered. Furthermore, as teams are dedicating tremendous time and effort into scouting and with large talent pools available worldwide, teams can easily find players with similar on-field qualities but possess dissimilar brand personalities. Thus, the purpose of the current study is to investigate the role of player signing in team branding. Particularly, this study examined the effect of player-team brand personality alignment on team-related fan responses. The empirical evaluation was undertaken with data collected from an experimental study. The authors empirically demonstrated that player-team brand personality alignment positively affected overall team evaluation and customer-based team brand equity, with more pronounced result for unfamiliar teams. Our findings not only establish the vital role of players in teams’ branding strategies but also uncover when aligned brand personality is more influential in reinforcing brand meaning and shaping affective brand evaluations and customer-based brand equity. The results of the current study fill gaps in the literature and extend the body of knowledge in branding studies in general and sports team branding studies in particular.