Introduction: Crowdsourcing Brand Equity

Abstract

This chapter introduces how Brand Fans addresses the agile and novel methods that the world’s greatest sporting brands have used to cultivate unprecedented brand value. The chapter presents how the best sporting enterprises have co-created staggering economic, social, and symbolic value through intense partnerships with their consumers that go far beyond what brands can develop through traditional approaches to marketing and communication. It specifies how the insights from these brands will be presented through three themes in the forthcoming chapters, the first focussing on the co-creation of value, the second on approaching brands as clubs of exclusive belonging, and the third on the powerful channels through which connections and identification can be canalised.