Brand Management Throughout Professional Athletes' Careers

This paper examines how professional athletes can optimize commercial revenues from endorsement and sponsorship agreements throughout their careers. The paper uses athlete brand management, defined as the balancing of brand building and brand selling activities, to understand the dynamics of commercial revenues optimization. It develops a conceptual framework that consists of two main blocks. First, the paper investigates four key determinants for the generation of athletes' accumulated commercial revenues. Second, it analyzes appropriate brand management strategies at different stages of an athlete's life cycle. It proposes a number of contingencies that refer to an athlete's characteristics, situation and environment, and argues that these contingencies determine the appropriate, i.e., revenues-optimizing and brand management strategy of an athlete at any career stage. Examples of professional athletes' brand management strategies support this framework. To the best of the authors' knowledge, this is the first paper to examine athletes' long-term commercial revenues optimization through athlete brand management