Exploring Rebrands in Football
As per Keller (1998), a brand is a set of mental associations, held by the consumer, which adds to the perceived value of a product or service.
More specifically, brand elements consist of a name, a logo, packaging, design and more; which identifies a product and distinguishes it - differentiating it from others (Keller, Aperia and Georgson, 2012).
Brand Equity is defined by Aaker (1991, pp. 27) as “a set of assets and liabilities linked to a brand, its name and symbol, that adds to or subtracts from the value provided by a product or service to a firm and/or that firm’s customers.”
In terms of footballing organisations, brand equity is an interesting concept to investigate since the main purpose of each team is to play football, and how different teams at each level of the football pyramid differentiate and leverage the qualities of their brand to increase and protect their brand equity will impact their revenue and commercial success.
Branding in football can be very different to branding in the usual corporate world, as these organisations' successes are mainly out of the hands of the CEO’s and owners etc, and the success falls on the shoulders of the ‘employees’ (which in the case of football are the players for each club). This creates uncertainty for some departments within each club, like the marketing team as they try to promote and protect a club’s brand equity.
Referring to De Chernatony’s (2010) ‘3 components of a Brand’s Vision’ framework (pictured in figure one): future environment, values and purpose all are extremely important in developing a brand’s vision to try and promote a club’s brand equity.
In the footballing world, clubs usually state their values, purpose, and vision on their website. For example, Manchester United’s vision is “to be the best football club in the world, both on and off the pitch” (Man Utd, 2022) and Manchester City “strive to be open and accessible, to provide the best service and support at all times” (Man City, 2022). Whereas Real Madrid’s values include: excellence, winning spirit, universality, solidarity, and humility (Real Madrid, 2022).
In terms of implementing their values and brand vision, clubs across the footballing pyramid and the globe have varying degrees of success. For example, Manchester United are currently on its worst trophy drought in 40 years, now reaching five years without a trophy (Sansom, 2022), while maintaining a top-five spot in the Deloitte Money League (2022), raking in €558 million in revenue in the 20/21 season, but they have still dropped a spot in these rankings, being overtaken by local rivals Manchester City. Whereas Manchester City and Real Madrid currently occupy the top two spots in the Football Money League (2022) both making around €640 million in revenues in the 20/21 season; and winning the Premier League (Sky Sports, 2022) and the Spanish treble (Real Madrid, 2022) respectively.
This demonstrates how no matter how strong your brand is in football, and how well you implement your values, nothing is guaranteed in terms of sporting success. However, in the long term, the values, purpose, and future environment can ensure clubs can at least protect their brand equity. For example, Manchester City have implemented their values very well, leading to them becoming a more attractive prospect for top players. They have invested £200 million towards the Etihad Campus, which is widely classed as the best training facility in the world, which left summer signing and England international Kalvin Phillips ‘gobsmacked’ when he saw the facilities (Sadhanand, 2022). This links to the future environment aspect of the framework, as they strive to always provide the best service (Man City, 2022) and they are developing this in all corners of the globe through co-branding to build brand equity. This also showcases a challenge that Manchester City have faced head-on in terms of promoting their brand equity, due to the sizeable costs of these developments in the short term, but they have paid off in the medium to longer term.
The City Group owns clubs including New York City, Melbourne City, Mumbai City, Yokohoma F.Marinos and more (City Football Group, 2022) which allows the ‘City’ brand with all its colours, imagery and success to be engaged within several time zones, spanning across many different continents. This will protect the brand equity of Manchester City in its local environment by developing the ‘City’ brand and promoting its brand equity in different areas of the globe through this growth, as co-branded products provide an enhanced quality signal compared with a mono-branded product (Helmig, Huber and Leeflang, 2008).
Brand identity is made up of what your brand says, what your values are, how you communicate your product, and what you want people to feel when they interact with your company (Wheeler, 2022), and this is important for football clubs in terms of their logos and other brand elements, which certain clubs utilise to protect their brand equity.
The increased popularity in social media has caused plenty of football clubs to rebrand their badges to align with the current trends of more simplistic and minimal designs to expand into other industries like merchandising. There is a current need to create a 360-degree holistic brand world and to have all the tools you need to tell your club’s story consistently across any channel, and through any physical or digital touchpoint (Woodvine, n.d.) which are all effective tactics when trying to increase your brand equity.
Logos and badges are extremely important in the digital world as this can be linked to the ‘E-Marketing Sloppiness Graph’ (Chaffey and Smith, 2017) (seen in figure two) where an ‘unengaging look and feel’ of a brand are key reasons for bad customer impressions and perceptions of your brand, so it is key to utilise your brand identity well to protect brand equity.
There are some key examples of rebranding that have been both extremely successful, and some that have failed miserably in comparison.
For example, PSG and Juventus, two European footballing giants, have both been through massive rebrands in the past few years. PSG has become a lifestyle brand, with strong creative content such as collaborations with Air Jordan and updating their badge (Mantoux, 2020) (as shown in figure three). This will increase and promote their brand equity as they are placing themselves in other markets such as the urban fashion industry, which will allow them to grow a wider target audience and can rely on commercial and fashion success and not just on the success of the footballing organisation. They have had to be bold and make ground-breaking moves in this industry, as usually football purchasing decisions are made by fans from emotionally-based loyalty, while for most other brands the consumer’s final choice is based on some sort of perception of which is the best brand for the price being paid, in football people know the best brand, but don’t always choose it (Cook, 1998) so to build brand equity, these collaborations and rebrands help gain new consumers into the business.
Juventus again are a great example of this, as their 2017 rebrand and identity change (seen in figure four), allowed them like PSG to transform themselves into a lifestyle brand, as Interbrand (the company who spearheaded the rebrand) created an identity that can accompany the club into the next 150 years, including custom typefaces and merchandise stretching to fashion and jewellery (McKinnon and Smith, 2018). However, a certain rebuttal and challenge they have faced is whether they have gone too far with the rebrand and are somewhat damaging the traditions of the club and therefore some brand equity with their diehard fans, so they must strike a balance with modernising themselves and keeping up with the modern times, and not alienating their core following.
An example of a totally failed tone-deaf rebrand of a football club is the short-lived badge change for Leeds United in January 2018 (seen in the adjacent figure five). The club claimed that they had gone through a ‘rigorous design process that lasted six months and saw over 10,000 people affiliated with the club consulted’ (Yalcinkaya, 2018). They quite clearly ignored the desires of the key stakeholder of any football club, the fans. On the same day that the new badge was released online to all their fans, a petition was set up by Leeds fan Steven Barrett urging for the new proposed logo not to be used which gained over 50,000 signatures by 7 pm that same day (Yalcinkaya, 2018). The petition was successful, and the new badge was not used or followed through with. This illustrates the need for football organisations to communicate clearly with key stakeholders in order to protect and maintain their brand equity.
This terrible rebrand can be linked to an early Kapferer (2004) model, discussing brand identity and image, (seen in figure six below). Leeds United clearly wanted a change in its brand identity but sent out ‘messages’ that were not consulted with the right people and stakeholders. The lack of communication was evident due to the u-turn of the rebrand happening on the same day and thus negatively impacting the brand image of the football club, and brand image is defined by Keller (1993) as the perceptions about a brand as reflected by the brand associations held in consumer memory. So, the ‘receiver’, in this case, the fans of Leeds United were not at all happy with the proposed change in the badge and design of the football club. This damaged the brand equity of the club as their fans had less perceived value due to the lack of communication and trust they thought they had in their club.
Aaker’s (1991) Brand Equity model (seen in figure seven below) is very key in terms of football clubs trying to promote their brand equity. The recent emergent success of PSG and Juventus are now being seen as modern powerhouses in terms of becoming a lifestyle brand, increasing their ‘perceived quality’ from not just football fans, but consumers from many different industries and markets globally. As Sammut-Bonnici (2015, pp.1) states, “When high brand equity is achieved through brand differentiation, the price elasticity of demand becomes low, allowing the company to increase price and improve profitability”.
With this example for instance, a PSG / Air Jordan pre-match jacket costs £134.95 (Nike, 2022) whereas the same jacket, for Chelsea is only £89.95 (Nike, 2022), priced by the same retailer on the same website, with PSG’s amounting at £45 more expensive. This is because the price elasticity is low because of the extremely high demand for this collaboration. PSG as an organisation can then invest these increased profits to improve current or set up future fashion collaborations, which will link to the Aaker (1991) Brand Equity model once again as the improved products will increase user satisfaction, further protecting brand equity through repeat purchases.
The rebrand of Juventus came only a year before the signing of Cristiano Ronaldo from Real Madrid for an Italian-record fee of €100 million, which caused their merchandising sales to almost double in his first full season at the club, and the club’s digital following increased by 90 million followers (Williams, 2019). This is no surprise, as the Portuguese superstar is the most followed Instagram account in the world (not including the official Instagram account) (Dixon, 2022) and is widely regarded as one of, if not the best players to ever play the game.
Also, in 2021 Paris Saint-Germain signed Lionel Messi (BBC, 2021) who is the third most followed person ever on Instagram (Dixon, 2022) and one of the best players to ever play football. Along with the obvious sporting benefits to his signing, Messi, and his new attacking beneficiaries Neymar Jr and Kylian Mbappe will bring millions of new global fans to Paris Saint-Germain. They also will have a fantastic global impact on their marketing strategy due to the pull that they have, as the club gained 6.4 million followers in the space of three days when Messi signed for the club (Koeshartanto, 2021).
Both examples mentioned above back up the statistic from Nielsen Sports (2014) that some brands have achieved a 20% growth in sales because of celebrity endorsement. So, the clubs rebranding themselves combined with signing some of the very best players in world football again links back to Aaker’s (1991) Brand Equity model as this will give them a wider global audience and give them both a source of competitive advantage over their competitors in the same country for example, which will increase the club’s brand equity as they will experience significant growth in their fanbases and number of consumers.
Consumer Based Brand Equity (CBBE) is defined by Keller, Aperia and Georgson (2012, pp. 54) as “the differential effect that brand knowledge has on customer response to the marketing of that brand”.
Football organisations certainly have the power to influence what a large proportion of their fanbase thinks about them, and this can be impacted by factors such as pricing, merchandising, players, staff etc.
A major challenge facing UK clubs in the upcoming winter of 2022 is the cost-of-living crisis, as the financial pressures are likely to become unbearable for thousands of households (Downie, 2022). An example of a football organisation that could come out of this being viewed negatively is Fulham, as Woosnam (2022) found that they have increased the price of a season ticket at Craven Cottage by 30% for their most expensive adult ticket, as in some corners of the stadium, the price has increased from £299 to £1000. They are now charging more for a season ticket than Manchester United, Manchester City, Chelsea, and Liverpool (Woosnam, 2022). This would mean that the club are positioning itself as offering a premium product, and although there is an argument to be made as they have been promoted from the Championship to the Premier League, it is difficult to argue why they should be more expensive than the teams listed above, which could have a possible negative impact on their brand equity.
This situation can be linked to Keller’s (2012) CBBE model (shown in figure eight on the next page). This could damage fans' perceptions of the brand, and cause poor consumer feelings and consumer judgements, as there could be seen as a lack of empathy and care from the owners of the club for the fans in a time of hardship, with the fourth most expensive season ticket in the Premier League (Woosnam, 2022) being viewed as unjustified with the product that is on offer. This could create a lack of consumer-to-brand resonance, which will damage the brand equity of the club as fans could begin to feel a disconnect in their relationship with the club and feel like they are valued more for their money than support. This could cause a huge issue for the ownership in trying to rebuild this relationship, which further showcases the challenges involved in protecting the brand equity of a football organisation.
To conclude, it is difficult for footballing organisations to promote and protect their brand equity, as there are often many intangible factors that influence this that people controlling the business and branding side of the organisation cannot control, such as sporting success. However, if a rebrand is done successfully, and key fans and stakeholders are consulted, football organisations can veer off into plenty of different industries to protect their brand equity against poor sporting performance, with effective implementation of a brand strategy.
