Foreign Sports Star's Brand Image Building Through Interactive Communication On Social Media

With the trend of globalization in sports industry,more and more sports stars are building their personal brands for the global market.The sports industry's market potential in China is viewed as vast,where foreign sports stars are trying to explore Chinese market and cultivate personal brand values through social media.Microblog,for its broad user coverage and functions of social networking and massage broadcasting,is used as the main tool by foreign sports stars to build their personal brand images in China.On the background of above mentioned,three research topics are discussed in this study.First,the construct of foreign sports star 's brand image on social media.Second,the interactive communication effects of the messages of foreign sports star's brand image on social media.Third,the strategy for building foreign sports star's brand image through interactive communication on social media.The study can be divided into three main parts.Part I uses content analysis method to code and analyze the post samples from foreign sports stars' Sina weibo accounts in order to figure out the construct of foreign sports star's brand image on social media.There are two main dimensions of foreign sports star's brand iamge: on-court image and off-court image.On-court image consists of 5 sub-dimensions: achievements,athletic performance,sportsmanship,teamwork demonstration,events discussion.Off-court image consists of 10 sub-dimensions: physical attractiveness,personality,interaction with fans,family & relationship,celebrity relationship,daily life,social responsibility,promotional & commercial,non-sports-related interests.The purpose of part II and part III is to exam the interactive communication effects of the messages of foreign sports star's brand image on social media.Based on the results of part I,independent samples t-test and the one-way analysis of variance(ANOVA)are employed in part II to test the interactive communication effects of the messages of different foreign sports star's brand image dimensions on social media.The tests results reveal that messages of off-court brand image dimension have better interactive communication effects than messages of on-court brand image dimensions;among off-court brand image dimensions,the messages of interaction with fans,personality and celebrity relationship have better interactive communication effects,on the other hand the messages of promotional & commercial show are not effective in boosting interactive communication;among on-court brand image dimensions,the messages of achievement have better interactive communication effects;the localized messages of foreign sports star's brand image have better interactive communication effects.Based on the results of the three parts of the study,the strategies for building foreign sports star's brand image through interactive communication on social media are proposed as a conclusion.The strategies include the strategy for off-court brand image building,the strategy for on-court brand image building,the cross-dimension strategy for brand image building and the localization strategy for brand image building.