Institutional brand personality and advertisements during televised games

✍ Scribed by Michael S. Harris

• Publisher: John Wiley and Sons
• Year: 2009
• Weight: 78 KB
• Volume: 2009
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 0271-0560
• DOI: 10.1002/he.365

✦ Synopsis

Intercollegiate athletics, predominantly those oriented toward spectators such as football and basketball at larger universities, hold a powerful place in the American psyche (Thelin, 1996;Bowen and Levin, 2003;Rudolph, 1990). Indeed, a safe assumption at many institutions, particularly those included in Bowl Championship Series (BCS) conferences, is that the head football coach and even the athletic director have higher name recognition than the university' s president or the most renowned faculty member. Most scholarly writing about spectator sports laments its inconsistency with academic values (Sperber, 2000;Bowen and Levin, 2003), increasingly commercial character (Zimbalist, 1999), and significant financial drain on institutions (Bok, 2003). Although these concerns are serious, college athletics also has powerful potential to foster institutional identity and organizational culture, increasing prominence (Toma and Cross, 1998), escalating prestige (Brewer, Gates, and Goldman, 2002), and creating differentiation among universities that are otherwise often indistinguishable (Toma, 2008).

No single marketing approach employed by higher education institutions reaches a volume of people as do advertisements during televised college football games, especially toward the end of bowl season every January.