Index of Paper Presentations for the Parallel Sessions - Academy of ...

Knowing about the behavior of their customers, marketers can take better strategic and tactical decisions regardingthe positioning and the marketing-mix decisions. Keller put more focus on creating a good and sound knowledgeabout the brand in the consumers‟ minds and clearly indicates this knowledge as the firm‟s most valuable asset. Heargues that financial valuation of the brand is of no use if the managers don‟t know how to exploit that value bydeveloping profitable strategies. Keller says that when the customer is familiar with the brand and holds somepositive, unique and favorable associations in the memory customer-based brand equity occurs.Customer-based brand equityAaker (1991) and Keller (1993) are considered as the most prominent views for providing insights into the customerbasedbrand equity. Aaker (1991) defined customer-based brand equity in terms of four basic dimensions and callsbrand equity as the set of brand assets and liabilities linked to a brand that add to or subtract from the value providedby a product or service to a firm and to the firms‟ customers. Keller (1991) presents his framework from theperspective of an individual customer based on brand knowledge. He defined customer-based brand equity as thedifferential effect of brand knowledge on consumer response to the marketing of a brand. He categorizes brandknowledge in two major dimensions: brand awareness and brand image. Brand recall and brand recognitionconstitutes the brand awareness dimension whereas brand image is composed of various associations of the brands.Customer-based brand equity occurs when there is brand awareness and the customer holds some strong, unique, andfavorable brand associations in memory.Keller also explains the benefits of having high customer-based brand equity. A brand having positive customerbasedbrand equity generates greater revenues, lower cost, higher profits, firms can command higher prices,successful brand extensions and licensing opportunities and also firms can have customers‟ willingness to seek outnew distribution channels and effective marketing communications. Simon and Sullivan (1993) argued brand-equityas the appropriate metric for evaluating the long-term impact of the marketing decisions taken by the managers. Tobe more precise, the strategic role played by brand-equity helps marketers to make wise management decisionswhich ultimately help them in gaining a competitive advantage.Spectator based brand equity and team brandingTill date, various researches on brand equity results in all different kinds of dimensions of brand equity. Someresearchers moved a step further and applied the concept to different industries such as healthcare sector (Blackston,1992; Ferguson, Paulin, and Bergeron, 2010; Meyers, 2009), services sector (Voss, Roth, and Chase, 2008; Berry,2000), sportswear industry (Tong and Hawley, 2009; Kocak, Abimbola, and Ozer, 2007; Vazquez, Río, and Iglesias,2002), financial sector (Mackay, 2001; Taylor, Hunter, and Lindberg, 2007), FMCG sector (Park and Srinivasan,1994; Netemeyer et al., 2004) and automobile industry (Tolba and Hassan, 2009; Pappu, Quester, and Cooksey,2007). Also, one such field where the leverage of brand equity has been garnered is the Sports Marketing field.Importance of sports can be seen from the fact that sport industry is now valued at an estimated $141 billion and itprovides opportunities on a global scale, for all the parties involved, to generate revenues (Klayman, 2009). As theconcept of ―Team Branding‖ has become more prominent in the sports marketing domain so it has become importantfor every team to develop its own image and maintain professionalism (Ratten and Ratten, 2011). Also, branding ofteam has been called as one of the most important assets of a sports organization by Bauer et al. (2005). Theassociation of multiple business houses with the teams had led the commercialization of the sports and has becomemore prominent in this decade of the sporting era.The management of the sports team is indulged in a number of marketing strategies to build the brand-equity of theirteams but at the same time measuring the brand-equity is also an important parameter for checking how much thefans value the team. Important questions that are to be focused are: How much is the fan base of the team?, Howmuch profit our team is making?, How much money we are earning from the sale of the merchandise? How manyspectators are viewing the matches of the team? All these questions relate directly or indirectly to the profits andrevenues of the sports team (s) and the simple answer to all these questions somewhat lies in the brand-equity. Cobb-Walgren, Beal and Donthu (1995) viewed that high equity brands contribute to the long-term success of theorganizations by generating higher consumer preferences and purchase intentions. Team-branding and developing aloyal fan-base helps the marketing managers to get connected to fans and at the same time helps the teams to fightcompetition and increase revenues. As a result, branding of teams has emerged as an important decision for themarketing executives.