Measuring Sport Team Brand Personality-Scale Validation

One of the more salient tasks for a sport marketer is to develop brand equity through the differentiation of the team’s brand within an oversaturated sport and entertainment market. Part of brand equity is the component of brand personality which involves associating the brand with human-like traits to which consumers can relate (Aaker, 1997). While brand personality measures have been found effective within traditional business literature, those same measures have not effectively captured the sport brand personality (Ross, 2008), possibly due to the largely “symbolic, experiential, and hedonic characteristics” related with sport teams (Tsiotsou, 2012, p. 243). In order to fill the need for a sport team-specific personality measurement, Tsiotsou (2012) used a sample of Greek sports fans to develop the sport team personality scale (SPORTEAPE) consisting of five personality dimensions: competitiveness, prestige, morality, authenticity, and credibility. The purpose of the current study was to evaluate the SPORTEAPE scale in the United States on a sample of National Lacrosse League fans using a confirmatory factor analysis. A five-factor scale showed acceptable fit in this sample, though the model suffered from a lack of discriminant validity. Future recommendations include item word revisions and varying the number of factors included in the model