A Case of Multiple (Brand) Personalities: Expanding the Methods of Brand Personality Measurement in Sport Team Contexts

Greg Greenhalgh
Brendan Dwyer
and Carrie LeCrom

This manuscript challenges the contemporary methods of measuring sport team brand personality (BP). The study of BP exploded after Aaker’s development of the brand personality scale in 1997. In 2010 Heere suggested a deviation from Aaker’s (1997) scale where she designed one instrument to measure the BP of all products or services. Conversely, Heere’s (2010) two-step method has the administrators of organizations under investigation provide the BP adjectives they feel best describe their organization, then have fans of that team assess how well the fans perceive each of the adjectives describes the organization. The current manuscript identifies two significant gaps in the sport BP measurement literature base. First, the current study proposes an expansion of Heere’s BP adjective collection to include administrators, fans, and nonfans. Secondly, the current study proposes that BP measurement move beyond only assessing the BP evaluation of fans/attendees and strategically include non-fans. Findings support these suggestions.