Brand Relationships with Hockey Teams

People relate to their favorite sports teams in a passionate manner. The experienced emotions are multifaceted ranging from happiness, pleasure, and pride to deep disappointment, anger, and hate. Sports managers view their teams as brands to be managed (Gladden and Funk, 2002). Sports teams, like other brands, generate diverse brand meanings in the minds of sports consumers. They have a strong symbolic dimension. First, sports spectating is a visible social activity. Second, the price of tickets to these events, along with the segmentation of seat location, influences consumers’ ability to attend, in this manner contributing to the variability in sports attendance. Finally, sports teams usually represent unique brands of a sports product category/activity grounded in their promotional activities, their style of play, personality and the atti-tude of the players, and their logos, slogans, and other brand signifiers (Armstrong, 2007).