Brand management applied to consumer behavior in extreme sports. A study of Spanish surf brands

Abstract

Despite being an activity of recent popularity in Spain, surfing is an ancient practice that has millions of followers worldwide. Through a natural and lively environment such as the sea, surf transcends sports, even becoming part of the lifestyle of those who practice it. The present work, whose main line of research is communicative in nature, has multidisciplinary implications that include areas such as sociology, anthropology, marketing and, of course, sports. Although the sports discipline enjoys a great interest on the part of academics from the branch of physical and sports activity (which focus their studies on didactic, sociological and/or recreational topics), this field presents a series of interesting implications of a communicational nature that have hardly been studied. Our proposal, in this context, aims to transcend the strictly sports and link it with the communicational, to the extent that it concentrates, on the one hand, a remarkable interest in the management of sports brands, and, on the other, the behavior of those athletes as consumers. Thus, and more specifically, one of the main objectives of this study is to know if there is any kind of implication between the concept of «consumer tribe» (in this case, the hypothetical consumer tribe of Spanish surfers) and the theory and the practice of brand management. As developed in this work, the concept of «consumer tribe» is configured as a marketing reality and differentiated from the sociological term of urban tribe characterized primarily by the establishment of a link value among its members that reveals a sense of shared belonging that stands out about the consumption of the object. In order to materialize this work, a methodology based on conducting 11 in-depth interviews with the managers of the most representative surf brands operating in the Spanish market has been carried out, and in the celebration of 4 focus groups with a total of 29 participants from those Spanish areas where surfing has a greater presence. The results indicate that tribal marketing offers a radical version of the classic paradigms of the study of the brand evidenced, mainly, in a categorical problem manifested in a scarce sophistication of the professionals that manage this industry in Spain.