Background and Objective of the study
As there is still no commonly accepted scale to measure the brand personality of sport teams, the purpose of this study was to develop and validate the Sport Team Personality Scale (STPS) in a professional sport context. The authors conducted a series of studies in the United States and United Kingdom with fans of the English Premier League, Major League Baseball, the National Basketball Association, the National Football League, and the National Hockey League.
Design and results
The STPS contains 18 items that load on to six factors: success, talent, entertainment, dedication, admiration, and care. The authors compared this new scale with existing sport team personality scales and used it to explore team identification and perceptual similarities and differences among teams. The STPS not only accounts for common method bias but replicates across different sports and cultures as well. Also consistent with past sport team brand equity and brand association research that distinguishes between product-related and non-product-related attributes, these six first-order factors map on to two second-order factors: performance and character. Finally, the study demonstrated how researchers and practitioners can use the STPS to position and differentiate teams within sport leagues. Specifically, the findings illustrated that the character aspects of team personality are a more powerful source of team identification than the performance aspects and mapped teams within a league along these two dimensions.
Implications
The authors anticipate that the availability of this new scale will encourage additional research on managerially relevant concepts that help managers improve marketing outcomes for sport teams. For example, while the authors demonstrated that the performance factor is not an important source of team identification, it may be an important driver of other marketing outcomes, such as attendance, retail spending, media consumption, or word-of mouth. Researchers could also provide stronger evidence for the predictive validity of the scale by investigating how STPS factors explain actual consumer behavior as well as the degree to which each first- and second-order factor drives individual behaviors.
Contact
Chair of Sport and Health Management
Prof. Dr. Jörg Königstorfer
Secretary: Mirjam Eggers
Uptown Munich Campus D
Georg-Brauchle-Ring 60/62
80992 Munich
Germany
Phone: +49.89.289.24559
Fax: +49.89.289.24642
info.mgt@sg.tum.de