The Rise of an Athlete Brand: Factors Influencing the Social Media following of Athletes

By Yiran Su, Bradley J. Baker, J. Doyle, Thilo Kunkel. Sport Marketing Quarterly, 2020

97 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Athlete brands exist within a network of brand relationships. Thus, considering the joint influences of related brands at different levels (league, team, and athlete) is essential for understanding how athlete brands are built. We focus on growth factors impacting athletes’ social media followings (Twitter and Instagram) around the critical juncture of team transfer periods. We use data from the NFL Draft, because this moment in time provides a key opportunity to capture combined influences from league-, team-, athlete-, and platform-related factors on athlete brand development. Through comparing a large sample of athlete social media followings before and after the draft, we identify immediate changes as athletes start their professional careers. Results indicate examining multiple factors in the same model is essential for understanding the role each plays in building athlete brands. The league and team represent master brands into which an athlete brand is integrated, and consequently athlete brands are provided with benefits from these new brand relationships. Results further demonstrate network effects, highlighting the importance of possessing a strong brand before a high-profile event.

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/026d564babcfd9817bf00820b039f499ba5df0f7

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

1. J. Doyle
2. Yiran Su
3. Thilo Kunkel

Citations in the corpus

• Athlete branding via social media: examining the factors influencing consumer engagement on Instagram (2020, background): “Research has shown that the level of exposure that a league event provides to an athlete and the number of social media followers of the team impacts the number of followers an athlete gains when they join a new team (Su et al., 2020).”