The challenge of renewing a varsity sport brand: a mixed-methods approach
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Purpose The purpose of this study was twofold. First, the authors analyzed how a major Canadian university sport brand was interpreted by its stakeholders and why the perception was so negative. Second, the researchers investigated how a dormant university sport brand could be revitalized. Design/methodology/approach A mixed-methods approach was designed. During the first year, a qualitative methodology was established. Researchers conducted 14 different focus groups, with students-athletes, students, coaches, university administrators, support staff and professors. In the second year, based on the initial findings, the researchers elaborated a quantitative protocol and built a multidimensional questionnaire which was administered to groups that were gravitating around the varsity brand. There were a total of 1,757 completed questionnaires. Findings The conclusions highlighted the weakness of the varsity brand and the limitations in leveraging the latter for the benefit of the institution. Contradictions in the marketing and branding decisions were noted, for which strategic recommendations were formulated. Research limitations/implications In essence, the contributions of the paper relate to the strategic management of the brand and the mixed-methods approach borrowed in this research. Understanding how a brand is perceived is essential for managers in elaborating their strategy and, therefore, being able to connect effectively with their audience. Originality/value The potential strategic leverage of branding for universities becomes even more valuable as these institutions are increasingly using their varsity programs to compete with one another. This study specifically analyzes the case of a Canadian varsity brand whose values and resources differ greatly from other North American institutions.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
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 | 0.003 | 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 | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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".