It Takes a Network and More: Athlete Activism and the Co-Creation of Athlete-Brand Meaning

Activism has the potential to both positively and negatively impact an athlete’s brand meaning (e.g., the perceptions held by others about the athlete). The present research extends prior work into how this occurs by adopting, for the first time, a multi-actor perspective. The data comes from the Instagram posts of 608 German athletes who participated in one of three mega sporting events (Tokyo 2021 Olympics, Beijing 2022 Olympics, and the 2022 FIFA World Cup in Qatar). Using an qualitative research design, we uncovered ten actor groups that contribute to the co-creation of branding meaning for activist athletes, and four different “levels” of co-creation performances: Autonomous activism, collaborative activism , sports-network activism , and beyond-network activism. We also found that brand meaning co-creation can be influenced by the number of actors involved, independent to the activism issue. Theoretically, the research contributes a novel framework for understanding the co-creation of an athlete’s brand meaning when engaging in activism and offers strategic insights for brand managers on the need to balance activism with other brand building efforts.