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Strategic Brand Management In and Through Sport

Brand creation and management has attracted significant attention in academic circles in the past five decades, with several, often contradicting views being expressed. The idea of a rigid, company-controlled brand (Fulmer, 1965; Lear, 1963) has been gradually replaced by the notion of a more flexible and consumer-focused brand personality (Aaker, 1997; Schade, Piehler, & Burmann, 2014), which has in turn been overtaken by the concept of a rather multi-stakeholder co-creation of brands (Pongsakornrungsilp & Schroeder, 2011; Zhang, Jiang, Shabbir, & Du, 2015). This cocreation suggests that the brand is shaped through the interactions between the brand owner/manager and its various stakeholders, which can trigger significant strategic managerial implications. However, while aspects such as brand consistency, or inconsistency among different stakeholders, stakeholder overlap, traditional and digital medial proliferation and power shift from the organisation to the stakeholders have been studied extensively (Harris & de Chernatony, 2001; Kenyon, Manoli, & Bodet, 2018; Manoli & Hodgkinson, 2019), the practical facets of these strategic managerial implications are in need of further exploration. It is these strategic implications and their unexplored practical aspects that this special issue aims to focus on, while centring on the vibrant and rapidly developing sector of sport. Sport, one of the most rapidly and steadily growing sectors world-wide, has attracted equally significant attention in the past three decades by academia and practice alike, as a previous special issue in this journal illustrated (see Manoli, 2018). As a result, sport brands, their uniqueness and management have also captured substantial interest, not only as an area worthy of academic exploration, but also as a means for other brands to explore and develop through it (Bauer, Sauer, & Schmitt, 2005; Henseler, Wilson, & Westberg, 2011; Richelieu, 2016), making sport brand management take two forms; brand management in sport and brand management through sport. This special issue aims to add to the ever-developing branding and sport branding literature, by exploring both forms that sport brand management can take, while taking into consideration its strategic nature and the rapid development of the sport sector and the wider social, technological and economic environment.