It may be baseball season, and the NBA and NHL Finals are upon us, but it is the NFL that still rules among sports fans and others nationwide.
The NFL was named the top “Sports League Brand of the Year” according to the just-released 25th annual Harris Poll EquiTrend survey. It was the second consecutive honor for the league, which came out ahead of (in order) college football, MLB and college basketball.
“The NFL faced challenges early in its 2012-2013 season, with the referee lockout beginning in June and replacement refs facing criticism that threatened the brand equity of the NFL,” Eric Stone, research director for New York-based Harris Interactive, said in a statement. “However, after reaching an agreement with the refs in September, the NFL was able to regain its footing, thus maintaining its strong brand equity scores, which reached its highest point in the three years we’ve measured the NFL in the EquiTrend study.”
Harris Interactive said that some 70 sports-related brands were assessed for the 2013 EquiTrend study, which polled more than 38,500 US consumers between January 11 and February 8. Participants were asked to assess more than 1,500 lifestyle, product and service brands in three main categories: familiarity, quality and purchase consideration.
Although ESPN was named as the top sports TV network, the NFL had a strong showing here, as well. Among those people polled by Harris, NFL Red Zone and NFL Network were the third and fourth most-popular sports networks, with CBS Sports second and NBC Sports in fifth place.
A&E was named as the “General Entertainment” TV brand of the year, coming in ahead of USA, FX, TNT and SyFy. The Weather Channel was selected as the “TV News” brand of the year, due in large part to such historic events as Hurricane Sandy and the number of tornadoes that wrecked havoc in the US.
Among the other sports-related products and/or marketing partners that topped their respective categories in the 2013 EquiTrend Study were: Under Armour (sports apparel), Clif Bar (energy bars), Full Throttle (energy drinks), Cabela’s (sporting goods stores), Subway (QSR) and Coke (soft drinks).
In what might be considered the biggest upset of the poll, Merrell was No. 1 in the running shoe category, outdistancing the likes of (in order) New Balance, Nike, ASICS, adidas, Brooks, K-Swiss, Puma and Reebok. The company, founded in 1981 and based in Rockford, Michigan, sells sports, hiking and lifestyle shoes and apparel around the world.
“In its second year in EquiTrend, Merrell has shown strong increases in familiarity and purchase consideration, which has driven its overall brand equity score not just above the category average for 2013, but all the way into the ‘Brand of the Year’ position,” said Mary Bouchard, VP and solutions consultant at Harris Interactive. “Merrell Running Shoes went head-to-head with high familiarity running shoe brands like Nike and New Balance and came out top-ranked.”
See the full Harris Poll 2013 EquTrend study here.
Barry Janoff is director of sports media marketing initiatives for PromaxBDA. He also is the executive editor for NYSportsJournalism.com which covers national sports marketing, business and media news; and a contributing writer for Yahoo! and MediaPost.
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