| About twenty-two years ago, when Chinese first National Football League started,there was a cheering squad formed, whose name is ‘fan’. They are all the way with the growth of Chinese football, warmly looking forward to the vigorous development of Chinese football industry. In the year 2004, in order to further enhance the level of Chinese professional football competition and brands, the Chinese Football Association officially launched Chinese Football Association Super League(CSL) on the basis of summarizing the past ten years. As the CSL hot held every year, the group team of fans is also growing. Meanwhile in the hope with the overall development of Chinese football, they started to support different football teams in different categories. Each group gathering together became a community, which is particular, no subject to geographical restrictions and based on a structured social relationship between brand admirers. It is called ‘fan community’. Fans from different community feel an intrinsic link which makes themselves feel different with individuals outside. They have the consciousness of kind and maintain the rituals and traditions of community’s history culture.With the scale of fan community expanding and the quantity of community members soaring rapidly, the problems have come up, like whether the group had built identity on a football club, from which dimensions to produce identity, how to further build the fan community from these dimensions in order to attract more fans to join and promote the sustainable development of the club itself. On account of problems above,the thesis is made by methods of literature review, interview, questionnaire survey,mathematical statistics and logical study, aiming to the study of the phenomenon that whether the existence of fan community has effect on building the football club identity. As exemplified by Shanghai SIPG Football Club, the effect study is from four aspects, the cognitive awareness, the behavioral involvement, evaluation and the interconnection to group. Providing some solutions and suggestions in accordance with the self-condition of our professional sports clubs, it will be the reference for optimizing the management of fan community.Through the experiment we draw three conclusions. First, the fan community has a significant effect on building football club identity. The average of the cognition awareness, the behavioral involvement, the evaluation and the interconnection to group of those who have joined the fan community is much higher than those who have not joined the fan community. Second, the football club identity can be divided into four dimensions, the cognition awareness, the behavioral involvement, evaluation and the interconnection to group. The cognition awareness has a direct positive effect on the behavioral involvement. The cognition awareness and the behavioral involvement have a direct positive effect on the evaluation. The effect of the cognition awareness on the interconnection to group is not significant, neither are the behavioral involvement or the evaluation. Third, the four dimensions of football club identity, the cognition awareness, the behavioral involvement, the evaluation and the interconnection to group, all of them have a direct positive effect on the purchase intentions. In other word, the football club identity has a direct positive effect on the purchase intentions.In this paper, there’re some limitations like the experiment was confined to Shanghai SIPG Football Club and so on. As an exploratory study, there’re some limitations about conclusions and recommendations that needs to be proved by practical verification. |
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