Sports teams and equipment manufacturers going international
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Purpose The purpose of this is to analyse co‐branding as leverage for both teams and equipment manufacturers in their internationalization endeavours. In other words, how can teams and equipment manufacturers benefit from their association in order to expand internationally? Design/methodology/approach The study involves four football cases for the 2009‐2010 season: Paris Saint‐Germain and Nike, Olympique de Marseille and Adidas, Olympique Lyonnais and Umbro, and the French national football team and Adidas. Semi‐structured interviews were conducted with managers involved with the four teams and their respective equipment manufacturers. The managers were marketing directors, VPs of marketing, sales managers or presidents of their respective organization. Sponsors, university professors and journalists who interact closely with the teams and equipment manufacturers were also interviewed. Findings It seems as if the team and its equipment manufacturer do not have a formal strategy to jointly benefit from their association. That would be very important for a successful collaboration and for joint internationalization. Currently, the actions appear a little too ad hoc and opportunistic, with some exceptions (i.e. PSG and Emirates Cup). In other words, the commitment does not really transpire yet in the co‐branding partnerships studied. Research limitations/implications Other teams in other sports and other countries should be studied in the next stage of the research. All the more so since the paper focused on a convenience sample, comprised of only French teams. Furthermore, special attention should be paid to the differences between North America and Europe. Indeed, in North America, the league is very much involved and controlling in the international expansion of its teams to the point that the league dictates the internationalization of its teams, brands and merchandising offering; whereas in Europe, teams have much more freedom to expand abroad. Originality/value The global brand strategy, which refers to a new market and an existing co‐brand name, would be the most appropriate for sports teams and equipment manufacturers. This would be especially true when both the equipment maker and the sports team benefit from a strong brand equity, which they could carry into international markets and use to trigger a strong synergy abroad. The global brand strategy bears some resemblance with the “Brand Conquistador” strategy, where partnership, either between two teams or between a team and an equipment maker, is used in order to expand internationally.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".