Mediators of Development of Brand Personality in Iran Football League

Background. Brand personality as a part of brand identity plays an important role in communications; if a brand has no personality, it cannot introduce itself and stay in the mind of the customer. Customer understanding about a brand is far more important than what is expressed as brand reality. Thus, developing an appropriate personality for creating a compatible image of the brand in the customer’s mind will be an important factor. Therefore, organizations must develop appropriate primitive principles to establish a long relationship with customers. Objective. This study was conducted to identify and introduce intervening and fundamental factors affecting the formation of brand personality of the Iran Football League. Methods. Here, a qualitative research was conducted using a grounded research method. Data collection tools involved deep interviews with experts (23 individuals) selected by purposive and snowball sampling. Data analysis was performed using open encodings, axial, and selective methods. Results. Based on the qualitative interviews, 33 signs were obtained for conditions influencing the formation of league brand personality (contextual factors and intervening conditions). Having analyzed these factors and summarized the findings based on the connection index and similarity with each other, and with the constant comparison, these signs were eventually reduced to five concepts or categories including product factors, factors unrelated to the product as well as the external and macro environment. Conclusion. If brand personality is defined based on market research or people's tastes, adapting the whole system with the brand personality and present promises is a tedious task. On the other hand, the research method contributes to obtaining the same pattern for each product category or service. So in order to build a brand personality from the organization perspective, managers and planners should identify intervening conditions and contextual factors which can disrupt the strategies adopted (intervening factors). Alternatively, with appropriate contextualization, they can contribute to the development of these strategies and act toward these factors for the formation of the brand personality of the league.