Fandom Equity

Marketing practice has long emphasized the development and value of brand-consumer relationships. Relationships between fans and teams are particularly powerful and usually contain greater depth, meaning, and intensity than brand-consumer relationships. Fans live and die with teams; customer do not live and die with their yogurt brands. A consequence of fan-team relationships is that sports brands have significant economic value. In general terms, this economic value is called brand equity. Measurement of brand equity is often challenging, but sports provide data and market structures that facilitate brand equity measurement. We refer to the value of sports teams’ brand equity as fandom equity.