The Effect of Ownership Marketing Expertise on MLB Attendance and Digital Consumption

Abstract

Scholarship has established that characteristics of a firm’s upper echelon affect firm-level outcomes in a range of industries. In professional sport, firms depend on live game attendance and, increasingly, the consumption of online content to generate local revenue. The ability to drive these two revenue streams depends on a franchise’s competencies in marketing, relationship management, and brand building. In this research, we speculate those competencies start at the top, i.e., with ownership. Using upper echelons theory (UET), we hypothesize that franchises with owners who have substantial marketing expertise are better able to drive attendance and online search traffic. Using a panel dataset of 30 teams over a 10-season period, we found that ownership expertise in marketing was generative of significantly more attendance but perhaps not significantly greater online traffic. The results are discussed in the context of UET, and implications for practitioners are presented.

Association membership, election cycles, and political donation patterns

“…Other work documented that owners’ functional career experience can be associated with function-specific outcomes. Owners with expertise in marketing were linked with greater attendance—and perhaps greater digital traffic—than owners with expertise in other areas of business (Hayduk and Walker 2021 ).…”

“…With this setting as a background, recent work investigated how owners’ political ideologies impact franchise-level outcomes such as operating margin, cost of attendance, payroll, winning efficiency, and employee turnover (Hayduk 2021 a). This work found that more conservative owners were associated with a lower cost of attendance for consumers, which was opposite to what was hypothesized.…”

“…There were no documented relationships found for the other outcomes. Other work (Hayduk 2021 b) explored how the degree of similarity between owners’ and local residents’ political ideologies affects attendance and consumer expenditure. As expected, long-tenured team owners who are also politically similar to local residents were associated with greater attendance per game and greater consumer expenditure per game.…”

“…Thus far, work highlighted important connections between professional sport teams, local politicians, residents, and consumers (Friedman and Mason 2004 ; Delaney and Eckstein 2006 ). In particular, some research explores how the political identity of team owners (as measured by political donations) affects organization-level outcomes (Hayduk 2021 a), and how ideological similarity between owners and local residents affects teams’ profitability (Hayduk 2021 b).…”

“…The results of this analysis produce implications for academics and practitioners. First, the variations across leagues and election cycles creates natural incentives for future research to examine the generalizability of previous league-specific findings (e.g., Hayduk 2021 a 2021 b). In particular, researchers should explore how teams’ valuations impact owners’ personal cash flow and donation patterns.…”