Introducing brand extension strategy in sporting teams: opportunities and challenges

Sport sector as largely demonstrated is one of most profitable and tickets sale is only in part the amount of revenues sporting teams can create. In fact they're able to create additional revenue stream thanks to appropriate brand strategy built on the positive emotional attachment existing between the consumer and the team. Anyway brand strategy supposes high brand equity that is the value added to a product by virtue of its name that is deep-rooted in the minds of consumers. Higher brand equity means increasing revenue direct and indirect (selling advertisements or making new sponsorship deals); enhancing fans' emotional connectedness with the team; enabling sporting teams to offer additional products and services, strategy known as brand extension. The aim of this work is to investigate opportunities and challenges of brand extension strategy in sporting teams. This is one of most profitable strategy, particularly used by teams list on the Stock Exchange that have to achieve acceptable levels of profitability for theirs shareholders. Management wants sporting teams grown and developed trough expansion in existing business by offering a larger number of products. Size of product-market changes: new products are offered on existing markets. A deductive approach is used to study both line and brand extension adopted by sporting teams. The first means extension in the same product category as the one served by the brand. Instead brand extension allows to sporting teams to offer products and services beyond the organizations' core product (match/event). Some researches in this sense have been yet conducted on English football Premier League, on U.S. Professional Sporting Team and on French Soccer Teams. This work focuses the attention on brand extension strategies adopted by Italian Professional Sporting Teams.