The Effect of Advertising on Sales and Brand Equity in Small Sport Businesses

Work in relationship marketing (RM) has implied that most large sport properties fail to enact sport relationship marketing (SRM) tactics that establish meaningful connections with consumers. Work in entrepreneurial marketing (EM) suggests that small businesses must innovate to implement elements of EM due to inherent resource constraints. Therefore, exploring SRM in an entrepreneurial, innovation-dependent context like small sport businesses (SSBs) may help explain why large sport firms struggle with SRM. Therefore, we examined whether SSBs’ marketing activities are generative of RM-specific outcomes and attempted to identify when and how these relationships can be augmented. Results from a dynamic panel estimator carried out on a sample of 332 SSBs over a 22-year span indicate that SSBs accrue only some of the benefits to be expected in the presence of successful SRM, highlighting the need to understand why sport properties of all sizes struggle to build meaningful relationships.