Building a Brand Platform Ecosystem for the Future Development of the Professional Sports Industry

Abstract

This chapter applies the strategy and technology management perspectives of platform theory to the professional sports context in order to address the issues of platform evolution and platform innovation, by integrating platform theory with the Service Dominant Logic (SDL) of marketing. With the advent of new media, the multisided market of professional sports is evolving into a platform ecosystem, and the role of its most important customers—the fans—will also evolve from end users, to value cocreators, complementors, and innovators. Designing an open platform to invite the largest possible number of platform constitutive agents (such as fans, television networks, corporate sponsors, and new media technologies) to innovate, while at the same time effectively protecting professional sports content as Intellectual Property (IP), is discussed.