Supporting the Cause: How Can Football Supporters Engage with a Club's Brand Extensions

Sammanfattning: Title: Supporting the Cause: How Can Football Supporters Engage with a Club’s Brand Extensions Seminar Date: June 4th, 2020 Course: BUSN39: Degree Project in Global Marketing Authors: Peter Moane and Alessandro Solmi Supervisor: Ekaterini Drosou Thesis Purpose: This research aims at understanding what English supporters of football teams with a small fan base deem important in order to buy, engage or interact with the brand extensions put in place by their favourite club, thereby contributing to the club’s revenue. Methodology: The thesis adopts a relativist ontology and a social-constructionist epistemology, which induced authors to choose a qualitative method and an abductive approach. 12 semi-structured interviews were conducted via video-call, where participants were Fulham supporters younger than 35 years old living in England, with more male than female supporters. The collected data was analysed following a thematic analysis approach. Theory: Three theories were used when approaching this study: social-identity theory (and consumer-company identification), categorisation theory, and expectancy-value theory. These theories were used as inspiration for the development of the interview guide and for data interpretation, though other aspects unrelated to the three theories emerged from the data. Conclusions: English supporters of football clubs with a small fan base consider six aspects to be important when it comes to the favourite team’s brand extensions: accessibility of the extensions, affordability of the extensions, respect of sentimental values, avoiding mismatch between the values attached to the club and business decisions, sense of belonging, and team performance. Practical Implications: The six aforementioned aspects should be taken into account by marketing managers and practitioners within the football industry, when trying to convert supporters into consumers of the club’s brand extensions. Keywords: Brand Extension, Engagement, Interaction, Supporters, Football Clubs