Search

For "centuries" manufacturers have been using marketing tools to disseminate information to customers regarding their products. The development of internet has forced companies to use digital technologies to interact with customers and tell them about their products. The purpose of this study was to analyse the impact of digital marketing on brand awareness among the customers of sportswear in Dar es Salaam City, Tanzania. This study applied analytic crosssectional design to analyse quantitative collected from sportswear customers that were selected using simple random technique. The data was gathered using structured questionnaire from 250 sportswear customers in Kigamboni and Kinondoni districts. Data were analysed using descriptive statistics and multiple linear regression model. The findings of this study indicate that, five marketing tools namely, content marketing, social media marketing, affiliate marketing, paid advertising marketing and pay-per-click marketing have positive and significant impact on brand awareness. On the contrary, e-mail marketing was found to have non-significant impact on brand awareness. This study has informed customers that searching for information regarding sportswear products is less time consuming and low cost. Moreover, this study informs sportswear manufacturers have to use more paid advertisements marketing since they capture more customers. Based on the findings, this study recommends that sportswear to invest heavy and continue to improve their paid advertising and pay-per-click marketing campaigns and to combine digital marketing and traditional marketing strategies for effective ad wide coverage in order to achieve higher brand awareness. The two-marketing media can create a synergy that is more beneficial than using either medium separately. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The sportswear industry has experienced substantial development as a result of the increasing demand for products that are both performance-oriented and lifestyle-oriented. This study examines the influence of economies of scale on the development and profitability of this dynamic sector. Despite the fact that industry leaders exhibit robust production efficiencies that are indicative of economies of scale, they face difficulties in managing the escalating operating and SG&A expenses. The study emphasizes the importance of stringent cost control measures and continuous innovation in order to maintain a competitive advantage and profitability in the sportswear industry amidst the changing market conditions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since the 1990s, most athletics federations have undertaken sponsorship negotiations with private shoe/apparel corporations. While these deals bring great sums of cash into the sport, some of which trickles down to the athletes, a great deal of it is used to leverage both hard and soft power in different regions of the world. The sponsorship regulations of national athletics federations have been recently politicized because of the ways that they conflict with their individual sponsorship agreements with other companies. Few, however, have examined the historical lineages and concerns for Ethiopian and Kenyan athletes – who come from some of the most cash poor and talent rich regions of the athletics world. This paper charts the historical relations and implications of the changes to commercial development and sponsorship as it pertains to Ethiopia and Kenya to broaden the geopolitical scope on this issue. Drawing on archival material and interviews with athletes and agents, it becomes clear that sponsors had their eyes on far more than outfitting the world's top distance runners with their logo. Rather, they were after soft power that would enable them greater control in the flow of goods and capital to and within these countries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: Trying on clothes in sportswear stores is a very time-consuming and tiring task. Virtual fitting rooms provides conditions where the online consumer can try on the clothes he wants before shopping. This technology has recently received much attention due to its commercial potential. However, this technology has not arrived to Iran yet, and it is obscure if the Iranian consumers accept it. In this research, the researcher is trying to investigate the factors affecting the acceptance of this technology by online sports consumers. Methods: This is an applied research. The mixed method was used, in which the Delphi technique was employed between experts of sportswear industry in the qualitative phase. In the quantitative phase, online consumers of sports products were selected as a sample. The snowball method was used to collect the subjects. The manager of Hafez store, a leading store in terms of providing online sport products in Shiraz, was asked to introduce 10 who often bought their sportswear online and were familiar with the newest technologies in this field. The subjects were requested to answer the questionnaire online and send it to other friends and acquaintances who bought most of their sportswear online and were familiar with the newest technologies in this field. Finally, 420 questionnaires were collected. The validity of the instrument was confirmed through the opinions of university professors and convergent validity. Cronbach's alpha and composite reliability were used to check the reliability. SPSS26 and Amos24 software were used for data analysis. Structural equation modeling was used to test the hypotheses and evaluate the overall fit. Results: The results showed the positive effect of all the factors including perceived usefulness, perceived ease of use, pleasure, arousal and dominance on the adoption of virtual fitting room by online sport consumers. Conclusion: The results of this research have practical implications for sports managers and retailers in relation to adopting the best management and marketing strategies to use virtual fitting rooms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: Virtual fitting rooms allow online sportswear consumers to try on clothes before shopping. This technology has recently received much attention due to its many benefits to sports consumers and commercial potential. Still, it has not yet entered Iran, and there is no information regarding its adoption by Iranian consumers. This research investigates the adoption of this technology by Iranian online sportswear consumers. Methodology: This research is applied and developmental in terms of purpose and exploratory in terms of implementation method. In this research, a mixed method (quantitative, qualitative) has been used, in which the Delphi qualitative method precedes the quantitative method. In the qualitative phase, 20 experts in the sportswear industry were selected through snowball sampling. In the quantitative phase, a survey of 394 online shoppers of sportswear products was conducted on social networks. Structural equation modelling was used to test the hypotheses. SMART PLS and SPSS 23 software were used for data analysis. Findings: The results supported the positive effect of the factors perceived ease of use, perceived usefulness, perceived enjoyment, and fashion leadership, as well as the negative impact of technology anxiety on adopting this technology. The results have practical implications for sports managers, retailers, and sportswear industries regarding adopting the best management and marketing strategies for virtual fitting rooms. Originality: This study examines the innovation of virtual fitting room technology among Iranian sportswear consumers for the first time. Virtual fitting rooms play a significant role in saving time, energy, and money for sports consumers and protecting their privacy. Also, this technology is a fantastic promotional device for sports industries and retailers if Iranian sportswear consumers accept it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Brand communication is an effort done by a brand to promote their unique traits or superiority against other brands, using many kinds of strategy. One of successful examples of brand communication is from lululemon athletica; a brand which focuses on athletic garments from America-Canada that centered in Vancouver. Lululemon is a company that swear and commit on developing sustainability and humane development through their natural and human resources, to the point where lululemon is known as an ideal model of brand for sustainability fashion. This scientific article is written to evaluate and to analyze lululemon athletica’s brand communication strategy using AISAS (Attention, Interest, Search, Action, and Share) analysis model. This research is using the method of qualitative. Data were collected through various sources. Primary data was obtained from observation via internet in the form of posters, videos, and social media activity about lululemon athletica. Secondary data was obtained through literature reviews. Lululemon athletica’s brand communication is focused on transparency, and also the health of both environment and their users; where this strategy resulting in successful trust from their users. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To solidify itself as a socially progressive global brand, the U.S.-based sports apparel corporation Nike produces and distributes advertisements featuring women from around the world as empowered, independently motivated athletes, capable of transcending all boundaries through their pursuit of athletic excellence. Some advertisements feature celebrity non-Western athletes such as South African track and field star Caster Semenya as part of an overall marketing message founded on the purportedly universal ideal of "girl power." This article argues that Nike's global pro-women advertising can be understood as a Western-centric, neoliberal, postfeminist branding strategy that reinforces existing social inequalities and reproduces the economic exploitation endemic to contemporary capitalism. The article analyzes three of Nike's advertisements from 2018 featuring Caster Semenya, focusing on how each universalize and normalize particularly Western, neoliberal, postfeminist ideals. Attention is given to the advertisements' reliance on the specific neoliberal postfeminist themes of individual empowerment and Western-centered gender norms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: The purpose of the research was to analyze the role of documenting the co-creation of customer brand value based on the perceived risk in the sportswear industry. Methodology: Qualitative analysis was used. So, eleven interviews with ecommerce experts in Iran have been done. They were selected purposefully and collected data through semi-structured interviews. After analyzing the data, 62 basic themes were extracted, and six comprehensive themes were obtained. Findings: We showed that the antecedents of co-creation of customer brand value based on the perceived risk in the sportswear industry include six comprehensive themes. They have customer-building behaviors, corporate branding, customer emotional perception, value creation, communication marketing, and expected risk. We argued that different dimensions of customer value co-creation could be influential in developing online businesses, especially in the sportswear industry. Originality: This research discusses the analysis and documentation of customer brand value co-creation based on the time risk of online brand communities in the sportswear industry. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Problem definition: In brick-and-mortar fashion retail stores, inventory stockouts are frequent. When a specific size of a fashion product is out of stock, the unmet demand might not be completely lost because of spillovers to adjacent sizes of the same style or to other styles. Little research has been done to study consumer response to stockouts of fashion products because researchers had limited access to proprietary data of fashion retailers and because it is challenging to estimate stockout-based demand spillover patterns using existing approaches due to the enormous number of stockkeeping units (SKUs) and frequent stockouts in fashion retail stores. To fill this void in the literature, we empirically estimate the stockout-based demand spillover effect in a fashion retail setting. Methodology/results: We obtain a large-scale data set from a fashion retail chain selling world-renowned sportswear brands. The retail stores in the sample are dedicated to products of a single brand. Using around 1.5 million granular and real-time sales and inventory records of 217 stores, 503 men's footwear products, and 4,024 SKUs over a two-year period, we develop a difference-in-differences framework to estimate the stockout-based cross-size demand spillover effect. We demonstrate the validity of this framework by conducting a pretrend test and a placebo test. We find that roughly 51.7% of the unmet demand of an out-of-stock SKU spills over to adjacent sizes of the same style when they are in stock: 25.1% to the adjacent-larger size and 26.6% to the adjacent-smaller size. The cross-size demand spillover effect is larger in regular stores than in flagship stores, larger for casual sports shoes than for specialized sports shoes, and larger for low-price products than for high-price products. Adapting an existing attribute-based demand model to our setting, we estimate that roughly 20.2% of the unmet demand of an out-of-stock SKU spills over to different styles when they are in stock. Taken together, these estimations suggest that about 28.1% of the unmet demand of an out-of-stock SKU becomes lost sales. We further find that when stockouts are widespread among SKUs, stockout-based demand spillovers are significantly reduced, resulting in much increased lost sales. Managerial implications: First, we empirically quantify the stockout-based cross-size demand spillover effect and its impact on lost sales in a brick-and-mortar fashion retail setting. Second, our simulation analysis shows that incorporating the cross-size demand spillover effect into the sportswear retail chain's proactive transshipment decision can substantially reduce its transshipment cost and improve its profitability. Funding: S. Li and S. Huang were supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China [Grant 72188101] and the Center for Data Centric Management in the Department of Industrial Engineering at Tsinghua University. Supplemental Material: The online appendices are available at https://doi.org/10.1287/msom.2022.1135. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Cities across the United States are increasingly implementing branding into their strategic plans. Several municipalities are finding creative ways to do so, paced by New York City's 2019 licensing agreement with sportswear giant, Nike. The city (via NYC & Company) and Nike entered into a 2‐year agreement that is claimed by Nike as the first known partnership of its kind. The contract allows the sportswear company to produce footwear and apparel with nearly all the city's likenesses, with product release subject to the city's approval. Buoyed by an analysis of relevant public and place branding literatures, this Viewpoint analyzes the cultural ties that serve as the foundation of the relationship between the two entities and the potential impact of non‐financial elements to consider within the agreement. The article offers questions that practitioners should ponder when deciding to enter licensing agreements when opportunities become available. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Gaining exclusive sponsorship rights to international football club apparel has become increasingly competitive, resulting in larger deal values. The first objective of this study was to analyze the effect of kit sponsorship announcements on the underlying value of sponsoring firms. Utilizing event study analysis, we found that firms announcing kit sponsorships experience negative abnormal returns. This finding may not be surprising given the fierce competition for obtaining valuable, scarce marketing space and the well-known winner's curse. The second objective was to shed further light on the value of kit sponsorship deals by conducting a novel test in which we analyzed a subset of sample observations where the kit sponsorship changed to a new sponsor. We found that firms may be willing to overpay for sponsorships to pre-empt their direct competitors from obtaining valuable, scarce marketing space. Firms losing a pre-existing sponsorship to a direct competitor experience large negative abnormal returns. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses various reports within the issue on topics, including the origins of mass production of sporting goods, the history of sportswear and sports equipment as technology, and how the emergence of mass markets for sporting goods in the 1970s turned retailers into innovators.

As the United States economy shifted to post-Fordist production models in the late twentieth century, the athletic apparel industry (specifically the brands Nike, Adidas, and Reebok) modified its promotional strategies. Whereas the industry traditionally touted the materiality and functionality of its products, the 1980s saw a substantial increase in marketing that aimed to inculcate products with symbolic characteristics and popular cultural associations. In particular, the industry deployed Black culture, and competed to associate their products with Black athletes, styles, and cultural signifiers. While this modification in promotional tactics yielded unprecedented growth for the industry, the images and messages communicated in this marketing served to exploit Black communities and reinforce the rampant biological and cultural racisms of the Reagan era. Engaging primary accounts from newspapers, magazines, interviews, advertisements, archival catalogues, and oral histories, this paper traces the historical shift towards racialized marketing through the athletic apparel industry's quintessential commodity: the athletic sneaker. Overall, I argue that scholarly analyses of technology must critically engage how goods are promoted and distributed in order to holistically comprehend the social, cultural, and political implications of sporting technology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Net Promoter Score (NPS) has been widely adopted by managers as a measure of customer mindset and predictor of sales growth. Over time, practitioners have evolved the use of NPS from its original purpose as a transaction-based customer loyalty metric, towards a metric for tracking overall brand health which includes responses from non-customers. Despite enduring managerial popularity, academics remain skeptical of NPS, citing methodological issues and ongoing concerns with NPS measurement. This study re-visits the use of NPS as a predictor of sales growth by analyzing data from seven brands operating in the U.S. sportswear industry, measured over five years. Our results confirm—within the context of our study—that while the original premise of NPS is reasonable, the methodological concerns raised by academics are valid, and only the more recently developed brand health measure of NPS (using an all potential customer sample) is effective at predicting future sales growth. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Federal trademark registration helps protect the hundreds of billions of dollars of brand value that trademarks can represent. Recently, interest in the failure-to-function doctrine, which prevents registration of proposed trademarks that consumers do not perceive as marks, has surged at the appellate body of the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO), the Trademark Trial and Appeal Board (TTAB). This Note is the first in-depth, focused critique of the TTAB's recent failure-to-function jurisprudence. It argues that, as the TTAB currently uses it, the failure-to-function doctrine is incoherent and lacks clarity. On a more granular level, the doctrine rests on inconsistent multifactor tests whose factors the TTAB adds, subtracts, modifies, reconceptualizes, and weighs differently across cases, giving the USPTO little meaningful criteria by which to decide what marks merit registration. This inconsistency risks increasing costs for the USPTO, brands, and consumers by creating uncertainty as to what proposed trademarks the USPTO will approve. In response, this Note proposes combining failure to function with a different trademark doctrine: the doctrine of aesthetic functionality. Replacing failure to function's unwieldy multifactor inquiries with aesthetic functionality's narrow focus on competition promises to increase clarity and, in so doing, mitigate or avoid costs to the USPTO, brands, and consumers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this study eco-friendly antimicrobial finish was developed by Azadirachata indica, Butea monosperma and Litchi chinensis and then applied on 100% silk fabric. The effectiveness of antimicrobial finish was checked up to 25 washes. The antimicrobial finish was extracted from leaves of these plants and applied on silk fabric by using pad dry cure method. It is true experimental study with pre-test and post-test control group design. FTIR and SEM tests were used to observe the presence of antimicrobial finish on silk fabric. The antimicrobial finish was fixed on silk fabric by the use of poly urethane binder. The antimicrobial activity of treated and untreated fabric and durability to successive washes were assessed by using ASTEM E2149 shake flask method. The treated fabric with A. indica and B.monosperme showed 100% reduction in microorganism presence while L. chinensis revealed 60% reduction against microorganisms. The antimicrobial finish showed 100% reduction after successive laundring up to 25 washes. This fabric is beneficial for home furnishing, sportswear and footwear industry as well as in apparel sector such as in formal wear and making matching face mask against COVID-19 pandemic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study aims to identify the relationship between materialism, brand loyalty and self-brand congruity. In this context, effects of materialism on brand loyalty and self-brand congruity will be examined in the research. The data of the study were collected face to face from a total of 313 people through a structured questionnaire. The surveys were applied to university students due to their high consumption trends. The obtained data were analyzed and reported with SPSS 20 package programs. According to the results of the study, it was observed that there is a significant relationship between materialism and brand loyalty, between materialism and self-brand congruity, and between brand loyalty and self-brand congruity. The study has two main limitations. First, the research was carried out in Konya. Second, it was carried out in the context of the sportswear industry. Materialism and brand loyalty have been investigated in different studies with different variables. This study aims to contribute literature by analyzing two variables with brand-self congruity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Buoyant swimwear is becoming more common in recreational swimming use, so the performance of buoyant fabric is important when designing functional swimwear. In this study, potential buoyant inlaid knitted fabrics for buoyant swimwear are investigated. Three types of knitted structures, half milano, full milano and 1 × 1 rib, are selected and various kinds of tubes and foam rods in different diameters are prepared for inlaying during the knitting process by using a 7 G hand-knitting machine. The mean differences among the levels of three independent variables, (1) inlaid material, (2) yarn and (3) knitted structure, on three dependent variables (net buoyant force, compression and tensile properties) are analyzed by using a multivariate analysis of variance. The result shows that the net buoyant force and mechanical properties of the fabric are significantly different due to the inlaid material and knitted structure, but not the yarn. The net buoyant force increases with fabric thickness and the outer diameter of the inlaid material. The inlaid fabrics are less compressible than the control fabric and show better recoverability with an increase in the diameter of the inlaid material. For the tensile properties, the inlaid material reinforces the fabric in both the wale and course directions, in which the stiffness in the course direction is significantly increased. The inlaid fabric is stronger and resistant to breakage in the course direction when the diameter of the inlaid material is increased. The findings of this study contribute to developments in the textile and sportswear industry. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The use of children's buoyant swimwear has become more common. However, its bulkiness and hardness restrict the wearer's movement. For better fit, comfort and mobility, a knitted buoyant swimming vest is developed. It is compared with two market samples using subjective evaluation according to the Functional, Expressive and Aesthetic (FEA) Consumer Needs Model and laboratory tests of objective measurements. The results of a paired-sample t -test show that a tightly fitting buoyant swimming vest should be worn out of water, as the vest becomes a perfect fit in water. Tests on the knitted buoyant swimming vest demonstrate improved functionality and higher buoyancy than that of two market samples conforming to British Standard EN13138-1:2014. The results of repeated measures analysis of variance show an overall significant higher satisfaction level in the knitted buoyant swimming vest than two market samples in terms of fit, comfort and mobility. The results of this study are significant for both the textile industry and the fast-growing sportswear industry. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Journal of Physical Education (20736452) is the property of Republic of Iraq Ministry of Higher Education & Scientific Research (MOHESR) and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)