How Do Co-branding Endeavors between Football Clubs and Streetwear Brands Impact Football Clubs' Brand Identity for Modern Football Fans? A Study of Football Clubs as Lifestyle Brands: The Fashionable Attribute of Brand Identity

Abstract

Football is the world’s most popular sport, but also a continually evolving industry generating billions in revenues. This evolution in the competitive, regulatory and consumer landscape has important implications as clubs are constantly looking for ways to increase their revenues to remain competitive, both at a sport and brand level. The most crucial and independent lever is to increase commercial revenues, where clubs can implement innovative solutions free from market regulations. Innovative initiatives are emerging in developing football club brands away from classical and toward more lifestyle attributes. Few clubs have gone in uncharted territory by leveraging the power of co-branding fashionable collections with major streetwear brands to reposition their brand identity. While previous research has analyzed and theorized the potential of co-branding strategies to transfer brand attributes between partnering brands, no study has explored how psychological and demographic factors can influence the co-branding endeavor effectiveness.
This study aims to explain the impact co-branding strategies between a football club and a streetwear brand have on the football club brand identity and how different communities and group belongings influence this impact. Specifically, this study investigates the relationships among the elements of a co-branding strategy (partner brands and co-branded product) and how these relations are strengthened by moderator constructs, namely football club and streetwear brand community identification, and generational belonging. Quantitative and qualitative data was collected through a survey, where respondents’ perception of the brands’ fashionable attribute, community identification and opinions were asked. The proposed conceptual model, inferred from a literature review, aims to explain relationships between these variables using PLS-SEM, and an MGA-SEM those same relationships for the different moderator groups. The qualitative thematic analysis is then used to triangulate quantitative results. Overall the authors prove that the co-branding strategy is effective in transferring the fashionable attribute from the streetwear brand to the football club, as the fashionable attribute of the football club is found to be increased by exposure to the co-branded collection. The study does not, despite certain moderator groups, substantiate that moderators reinforce the relationships between variables, but does, for most moderators, attest of the impact on levels of fashionable attribute perception of these same variables.