Academic Research

Sports fandom has been irreparably changed this year and it’s not just about declining television ratings. What can we learn from the NBA as a sample case? The NBA Finals drew its lowest viewership in decades. Despite the Finals featuring the league’s biggest star in LeBron James and its most iconic franchise in the Los Angeles Lakers, the NBA Finals ratings dropped 51 percent from last year. Predictably, given the supercharged political environment of 2020, many explanations had an ideological basis. The NBA alienated fans by becoming “too woke.” Or, the explanation is anything other than a fan response to the players advocating for social justice. The truth is mixed and more complex.

Of all the sports analytics work that I have done, perhaps the most surprising (to myself) has been my work on team names and mascots. I’m also a little surprised at how frequently folks want to talk about issues surrounding mascots. I probably take a dozen calls per year from journalists about various mascot issues. (July 2020 Update –With the Washington DC Football team in the process of finding a new name, the volume has bumped up). I came to the study of mascots based on a personal curiosity. I’m an Illinois graduate and witnessed the controversy surrounding the “retirement” of Chief Illiniwek. As always in these controversies, there is a lot of passion on both sides. My interest was a bit different. I was interested in the potential impact of team name changes on schools’ brand equity. In other words, I was interested in the business side of the discussion. The linked article provides an OpEd piece related to my work on valuing mascots. The basic research question is how does a team name or a mascot change effect the value of a team’s brand or the loyalty of its fans. It is a tricky empirical challenge. I have a good deal of experience in measuring brand equity in sports but in this case. It is hard to separate out the effects of team names and mascots because these things rarely change. And when controversial mascots do change, they only shift in one direction. My research approach on this project was to do the we can with the available data and to happily acknowledge the limitations. Why Does it Matter? I’ve come to love the study of mascots and it is one of my favorite topics to discuss. Though I should add, that it is the topic on which I am most frequently misquoted or my views are misrepresented. In particular, liberal media outlets have often “selectively” edited my comments. It is also a topic that has some pretty interesting theoretical fundamentals. Some may believe that it just doesn’t matter if the names and symbols that are the foundation for a team’s brand are animals (Lions, Tigers or Bears), professions (Cowboys, Packers, or Steelers) or something else (Red Sox, Jazz or Lakers). There is merit to this opinion. Winning traditions and a history of star are much more important for building sports brands. The Lakers are the perfect example. If the team has won 16 championships and is located in a media mecca it doesn’t matter if there aren’t too many lakes in the vicinity of the stadium. But, at a fundamental level there exists a relationship between a team and its fans. Team names and mascots often provide a means for creating a focal object that can represent the team’s side of the relationship. In some ways this is old school marketing. Charlie the Tuna or the Green Giant is the personification of the brand. The Cowboy is the symbol for the Dallas football team, Reveille is the shared pet of all Texas AM fans and Philadelphia hockey fans probably hope that Gritty haunts the nightmares of Rangers fans. Hope you enjoy the piece and appreciate how it fits into the the larger topic of brand building in sports. And finally, Uga is the best mascot.

This research project combined classic customer relationship management with sports fandom. Fans are an especially passionate type of consumer so we can get a pretty good understanding of the sports business by analyzing fan behaviors. From my perspective, studying fans is more interesting because the intense passion for their teams, entertainers or politicians, leads to some unique behaviors. The project started with the question of how does a secondary market like StubHub influence the behaviors of fans? A simple question that required a complicated analysis.The basic structure is simple. The advent of a secondary might reduce demand for season and single game tickets because there is less of a need for the fans to pre-commit. Alternatively, the creation of a secondary market might increase demand because consumers can unbundle ticket packages and sell unneeded tickets.But the analysis is complex. We start with an economic model that captures the structure of consumer utility and costs related to the options to purchase season ticket, single game and secondary market tickets. It gets especially complicated because we build in expectations of team quality based on payrolls and current winning rates. It’s a math heavy read but at its core, it is a very through analysis of fan behavior.

In addition to sports, I have also done research in the area of political campaigns. Consumers, fans and voters all share some broad similarities. For example, brand loyalty, fan loyalty and party loyalty are all built on a combination of preferences, habits, and identity. The relative value of these factors may vary across contexts but choices of and loyalty to brands, teams and candidates can be studied with the same methods and theories. Below you will find links to two academic papers related to politics.The first paper examines how candidate appearance influence electoral outcomes. Other researchers have found that having a “competent” appearance tend to do better in electoral contests. They actually find that the more competent appearing candidate tends to win the majority of election contests. Our approach is more fine grained. We consider a variety of appearance measures –competent, intelligent, likable, honest and several others. We also consider the possibility that candidate appearance operates differently across the two parties. In fact, we find significant differences in the ideal appearance of Republicans and Democrats. Read the paper – but the short hand summary is that Republicans do better when they look like the football coach while Democrats excel when they look like faculty. The second paper delves into the subject of political advertising. Studying advertising effectiveness is challenging because advertising spending is usually a function of candidate popularity and other attributes. This usually translate to the more popular candidate having more money to spend. We use an innovative identification strategy to understand the true effects of candidate advertising. More importantly, we also look into how the source of advertising (candidate versus PAC) influences advertising effectiveness. In general, we find that advertising by outside groups tends to be ineffective. This finding is important for a variety of controversies and debates ranging from regulating campaign spending by outside groups and event the likelihood of a few thousand dollars in Russian interference mattering.