Prioritizing the Factors Affecting Brand Equity of Popular Football Clubs in Iran

Background. Today, Building strong brands, Because of the extraordinary advantages that it creates, have been the marketing priorities of many organizations. Strong brands for a company, Creates an identity in the market. Objectives. This study aimed at Prioritizing factors affecting brand equity of popular football clubs in Iran. Methods. The design of the study was descriptive with practical goals. The participants of the study included two groups; the first group consisted of marketing and sport experts and sport managers. The participants in the second group were the fans of the mentioned clubs. There were 163 and 384 participants in the first and second group, respectively who were randomly selected through Morgan table. The instrument used to gather data was a likert questionnaire including 59 questions. This questionnaire was validity- checked by the study professors, and its reliability was measured 0.95 by cronbach alpha statistical test. Descriptive data analysis was done for population description and their responses. Partial least squares test was also performed for analytic analysis. SPSS 18 was the software for data analysis. Results. The results of the study showed that from the managers and experts’ and fans perspective, the factors affecting the brand equity of Perspolis and Esteghlal football clubs In order of priority were the team’s history, management, team’s success, head coach, stadium, sponsors, team’s stars, media, fans loyalty and logo. Conclusion. According to the results, It seems that managers of Popular clubs like Esteghlal and Persepolis, to promote their club brand equity should have the necessary attention to factors such as team’s history, management, team’s success, head coach, stadium, sponsors, team’s stars, media, fans loyalty and logo.