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

For our research purpose, the scope was limited to cricket as a sport. Even in cricket, Indian Premier League (IPL)was strategically chosen for the study. Indian Premier League, having the most interesting franchisees that the worldhas seen recently, provides marketers with seemingly endless marketing opportunities. It is the only sporting event inIndia to catch the attention of the people and corporate houses to a greater extent. People are seeing internationalcelebrity players drafted into city-based franchises and playing with Indian players and it is thus greatlyacknowledged by the people. So, the application of the concept of brand-equity to the teams of the Indian PremierLeague is justified.In the first phase of the research a pilot study was conducted and data was collected from 210 respondents agedbetween 12 to 55 years having awareness about IPL and who watch IPL matches on television. The main purpose ofthis pilot study was to select a team out of the various teams of IPL. The respondents were asked to recall threeteams playing in the IPL. Mumbai Indians followed by Chennai Super Kings were found to be the top two recalledteams of the IPL respectively. The decision to select Mumbai Indians was arrived at after finding that MumbaiIndians was the most recalled team with 67 (30.5 %) respondents followed by Chennai Super Kings with 49 (22.2%) respondents.SampleHaving considered that the youth comprises the major target customers for sport organizations and for sport relatedconsumption (Dickson et al., 2004), the target population was defined as the university and college students andemployees who watch Indian Premier League on television and are aware of the teams playing in Indian PremierLeague. This group of youth is willing to spend more time watching sports on television, thus, representing the mostimportant segment for the sports team(s). Questionnaires were distributed to 430 university and college students inJammu having interest in IPL and were asked to fill the questionnaire. The participation of the students was entirelyvoluntary. Two hundred forty (240) questionnaires were returned and after data screening, and omitting outliers, 220were kept for data analysis, for a response rate of 51.2%.Instrument and MeasuresThe spectator based brand equity model (SBBE) of Ross, Russell and Bang (2008) was used for validation andmeasuring the brand equity of Mumbai Indians. For making the SBBE model more suited for television viewers, itwas subjected to minor modifications. For this purpose, a qualitative study was conducted in the second phase of theresearch for identifying appropriate associations of peoples with respect to IPL. Data was collected from 40respondents through online survey and personal interview to find out different associations regarding the teamsplaying in IPL. It was observed that most of the associations were covered in the SBBE model but none of therespondent talked about team concessions and stadiums as the appropriate associations. The concessions andstadium/home constructs were then removed from the original model as we believed both these constructs will beirrelevant for the viewers watching the sport on television. It was also observed during the qualitative study thatpeople also associate a team with its sponsor(s) and celebrity player(s).The model which was finally tested in context of television viewers, thus, consisted of two second order latentvariables as brand awareness and brand associations. The brand awareness construct consisted of two latent variablesas team identification (4 items) and team internalization (3 items). The brand association construct consisted of eightlatent variables as brand mark (3 items), team history (3 items), team success (3 items), non-player personnel (3items), team rivalry (3 items), team commitment (3 items), organizational attributes (2 items) and socialization (3items).A 33-item questionnaire was drafted to measure the brand-equity construct of Mumbai Indians using the modifiedSBBE model. Initial 30-items in the questionnaire were used for the validation of the SBBE model. In addition to the30-items, extra 3-items were included in the questionnaire to measure the brand associations with respect to thesponsor(s) and celebrity player(s) as observed during the qualitative study. The questionnaire also includeddemographic information and some multiple choice questions for assessing the information processing habits of therespondents, frequency of watching IPL matches and most importantly their main reason for watching IPL. Thequestionnaire was pretested with a small sample of 30 respondents to look for any error or loop hole. After somemore modifications a final questionnaire was devised in English language as it is known to the university and college