Investigating consumer preferences and perceptions of brands across men’s and women’s sport: a brand architecture approach

Understanding consumers’ perceptions of sport brands has received widespread scholarly attention, however most of this work has focused on men’s sport. The current research considers brand architecture to examine the preferences, perceptions and attitudinal loyalty of individuals who support men’s and women’s professional sport. We explore if, and to what extent, consumer-based brand association perceptions attached to men’s and women’s teams within the same club vary. Data were collected using an online survey from Australian consumers who indicated following a men’s and women’s league (N = 525). Almost half (N = 231) followed the same team across men’s and women’s sport and in each case the brands used by these teams were the same. Confidence interval and Random Forest analyses determined if consumers’ perceived brand associations differently across their favourite men’s and women’s teams, and the importance of the brand association sets to attitudinal loyalty in each case. Results indicated the brand association sets possessed similar predictive power for attitudinal loyalty in the men’s (55%) and women’s (51%) contexts, and the same five brand associations (emotions, socialisation, esteem, nostalgia, and escape) emerged as the most important across both. Results outline the utility of a branded house approach to achieve brand selection, whilst demonstrating the need to manage brand extensions as distinct entities. Findings extend past work by examining consumer patterns across men’s and women’s sport concurrently, and by exploring respondent gender differences. These findings have implications for sport organisations pursuing brand extensions more broadly in an increasingly entrepreneurial and global market, as well as practitioners managing multi-brand portfolios.