Human Brands in Sport: Athlete Brand Personality and Identification

TLDR

The study tests how perceptions of athletes as human brands influence consumers’ cognitive identification by integrating social identity theory with brand personality. The authors developed a model combining social identity theory and brand personality to examine how athlete brand perceptions shape consumer identification. Consumers view athletes as human brands with unique personalities; athlete prestige and distinctiveness drive identification, leading to emotional attachment, team identification, increased merchandise purchases and viewership, and marketers can leverage these insights to boost retail spending and spectatorship.

Abstract

By integrating social identity theory with brand personality, the authors test a model of how perceptions of human brands affect consumer’s level of cognitive identification. The findings suggest that consumers view athletes as human brands with unique personalities. Additional findings demonstrate that athlete prestige and distinctiveness leads to the evaluation of athlete identification. Once consumers identified with the athlete, they were more likely to feel an emotional attachment to the athlete, identify with the athlete’s team, purchase team-related paraphernalia and increase their team-related viewership habits. The findings extend previous research on human brands and brand personalities in sports. Marketers can use the information gleaned from this study to better promote products that are closely associated with well-recognized and attractive athletes, thereby increasing consumer retail spending. In addition, the findings offer new insights to sports marketers seeking to increase team-related spectatorship by promoting the image of easily recognizable athletes.