Revisiting Spectator-Based Sports Team Reputation: Strategic Implications for Team Managers

Prior works on corporate reputation are primarily derived from the fields of marketing, management and sociology, yet, except for Jang et al. (Int J Sports Mark Spons 16(3):52-72, 2015), none of those works examine and measure reputation for sport teams. Even with Jang et al. (2015), a major limitation is that they use a small non-probability convenience sample of students and hence, their scale may have limited generalisability. This work rigorously re-tests the scale for its empirical efficacy to measure reputation of sport teams, in context of the most popular cricket league in the world, the Indian Premier League (IPL). We use a randomly selected pool of 440 and 481 IPL team fans at two different points in time. This work not only revalidates an important scale with a large set of real consumers but also examines the importance of a sport team's reputation for spectator identification and re-engagement intentions as a check for nomological validity. Findings have strategic implications for managers who can evaluate their team's reputation with this framework and use it to create more fan engagement.