مقاله سال ۲۰۱۸

Sport – an important type of hedonic service industry (Hightower, Brady, & Baker, (2002)) – has become increasingly commercialized and lucrative (Sainam, Balasubramanian & Bayus, 2010) around the world. In the Western context, for instance, football teams attract many fans who attend matches as their major leisure activity (Biscaia et al., 2016; Theodorakis et al., 2013). With the flourishing of sport competitions (Sainam et al., 2010), the success of a sport team not only requires fan support but also branding as champions (Stokburger-Sauer & Teichmann, 2014). To some extent, developing and managing brand equity is especially crucial for professional sport teams (Biscaia et al., 2016). Several European professional football teams have done a good job in regard to this strategy. For example, the English soccer club Manchester United was recently ranked the sport’s number one brand with a value of US$1.21 billion (Brand Finance, 2015).

Although the practice of building brand equity in the professional sport team context is not new, initial scholars in the sport marketing literature with regard to the creation of brand equity focus on providing an initial understanding of how a team’s brand equity can be conceptually built (Gladden & Milne, 1999; Gladden et al., 1998; Ross, 2006) or can be measured (Bauer, Sauer, & Schmitt, 2005; Biscaia, Correia, Ross, Rosado, & Maroco, 2013; Biscaia et al., 2016; Ross et al., 2008; Ross, ۲۰۰۶). Many researchers have depended on social identity–based identification (Boyle & Magnusson, 2007; StokburgerSauer & Teichmann, 2014; Underwood, Bond, & Baer, 2001; Watkins, 2014; Wear et al., 2016) to investigate the effects of single, specific targets of identification on sport teams’ brands or brand equity in a variety of sport contexts. However, these researchers have separately, rather than simultaneously, considered how different targets of identification contribute to sport team brand equity in the professional sport context. Given that sport fans can develop their identification with multiple targets (Ashforth & Johnson, 2001), they not only identify with the sport team itself (e.g., Gwinner & Swanson, 2003; Katz & Heere, 2016) but also increasingly tend to perceive team brands as potential identification targets (Stokburger-Sauer & Teichmann, 2014). Accordingly, it is important for sport team managers to know that these two targets of identification from unique sport fans can exist concurrently when creating sport team brand equity.

In addition, sport team brand equity researchers have focused on the Western sport market, both in Europe (Bauer et al., 2005; Biscaia et al., 2013; Biscaia et al., 2016; Stokburger-Sauer & Teichmann, 2014) and the United States (Boyle & Magnusson, 2007; Gladden & Milne, 1999; Gladden et al., 1998; Ross et al., 2008; Ross, 2006; Watkins, 2014; Wear et al., 2016). The scant consideration of the Asian professional sport context provides an opportunity for greater understanding of the formation of sport team brand equity beyond the Western sport market. More specifically, unlike the majority of professional sport team brands in the Western market which carry the name of the city where they are located, like Manchester United and the New York Yankees, professional sport team brands in the Asia–Pacific region include the name of the companies that own them (Walsh, Hwang, Lim, & Pedersen, 2015). Examples are the Uni-President 7-Eleven Lions, the Samsung Lions, and the Yomiuri Giants in the Taiwan, Korea, and Japan professional baseball leagues, respectively. While lessons from the fans of successful sport teams indicate they have identified with their favorite team and team brand (Stokburger-Sauer & Teichmann, 2014), it is possible that sport fans in this context are likely to distinguish between identification with the sport team itself (affective perspective) and the sport team’s brand (cognitive perspective; Swanson & Kent, 2015). What has yet to be examined is the role of these two distinguished identifications in exerting independent and equivalent impacts that bridge the relevant antecedents on the formation of sport team brand equity especially in one of the Asia-based professional sport context.