Abstract
Purpose The National Football League (NFL), the most lucrative sports league in the world, has its second largest foreign audience in Brazil. Its Brazilian broadcasts stimulate the audience to extrapolate television reception and interact through a social media platform, seeking to integrate a collective consumption. Thus, attachments are established between consumers and league. Based on this, this study aims to analyze how the interaction in social media of the Brazilian NFL audience, during the transmissions of its games, results in consumption attachments. Design/methodology/approach The method undertaken was Netnography, commonly used to investigate cultural practices occurring in online environments. The research corpus consisted of messages posted on Twitterhashtags created by the ESPN Brazil channels to reverberate its broadcasts of the league between 2016-2017 and 2017-2018 seasons. Findings The findings of this study indicate that Brazilian audience interaction in social media establishes consumer attachment with the NFL by means of the brand elements and aspects of social life, mediated by the league. Research limitations/implications The research observed only the part of the Brazilian audience of the NFL that engages in the broadcasts of the games through social media. Practical implications The research of this study demonstrates how brands can use social media to enable social interactions that create or improve consumer attachments with them. Originality/value The study presents how a media brand imbricated in the American culture has been the target of attachment by Brazilian fans through social media interactions.
Highlights
Sports are one of the most important modern entertainments, because they are massively mediated, but no longer limited by physical and geographical constraints
Brazilian National Football League (NFL) fans consider players vital to league enjoyment, since they athletes understand that players make sports spectacles complete
The routine of some Brazilian NFL fans changes during the league season
Summary
Sports are one of the most important modern entertainments, because they are massively mediated, but no longer limited by physical and geographical constraints. According to Whannel (2014), sports can be divided into two categories: practice sports, which has popular commotion and a significant number of practitioners in a given place or culture, and media sports, which is popularized by worldwide broadcasts and has repercussion among viewers. Some of these media sports are broadcasted in several countries, their practice and wide popular commotion are restricted to the cultural context they belong to (Wenner, 2012; Whannel, 2014). It is the case of American football and its main league, which is known as National Football League (NFL). Despite its growing audience in several countries (ESPN Brasil, 2017; TSN, 2016), the popular and cultural commotion of this sports category are fundamentally restricted to its country of origin (Oatesl, Furness, & Oriard, 2014; Wenner, 2012)
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