Brand Management Strategy for Korean ... - Brunel University

for the teams. This loyalty proves to be permanent, unfaltering, and encourages
significant commitments in terms of time and money (Pooley, 1978; Sutton et al., 1997).
Existing research on sports branding suggests that fans who are deeply identified with a
specific team tend to hold an extremely high degree of loyalty, and frequently regard the
team as being central to their identity (Funk and James, 2006). Gladden and Funk
(2001) propose that the degree of identification between fans and sports teams is the
best logical predictor of team loyalty. Furthermore, identification can be equated with a
sense of belonging (Williams, 2000). Football fans are an excellent instance of
identification translating into a sensation of ownership in the team, including
involvement in the emotions associated with defeat and victory. In these circumstances,
the success and failure of the team may be closely analogised to the personal success
and failure of the fan.
The significance of identification with fans is well established in literature related to
sports consumption (Kelley and Turley, 2001; Gwinner and Swanson, 2003; Carlson
and Donavan, 2008). In determining the factors which influence whether an individual
becomes an enthusiastic fan of a sports team, it is important to examine the consumer-
organisation identification process in the team sport setting. It might be strange to note
that, despite the potential that this kind of process has in building effective consumer
relationships, there is relatively little empirical research which applies the concept of
identification to the context of team sports (Gwinner and Swanson, 2003).
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