PES6255 Chap.8 Athlete Branding and Self Presentation Online
Athlete Branding and Self Presentation Online
An athlete account is three things at once
This chapter puts the media theories on an individual. An athlete with an account is performing a role for an audience, building a commercial asset and living in public simultaneously.
The class treats social media as an extension of the front stage, where private life becomes content and the account becomes a vehicle for forming an identity rather than merely reporting one.
The published branding model sorts content by the same geometry, separating front stage presentation, which is athletic performance, from backstage presentation covering appearance, lifestyle and relationships with teammates, and from off stage content unconnected to the sport, with two marketing orientations and two engagement outcomes, likes and comments, treated separately.
What the engagement evidence rewards
The uncomfortable part of this literature is its specificity.
Studies of what predicts a large and growing following report that sexually suggestive images attract the highest engagement of any content type, that a mix weighted towards private rather than professional content predicts following, and that image quality, video, self focused content, content with teammates, charitable activity and visible connection to local culture all contribute.
A later review reports the same asymmetry from the other side: posts about private life, appearance and personal opinion draw more engagement than posts about matches, competitions and business activity.
The content that performs best is the content an athlete can least afford to keep producing.
The cost side, and why it is not an individual problem
A study conducted around one Olympic Games recorded abuse directed at competing athletes.
Most of the athletes who received abuse were women, the large majority of identified abusive posts were directed at female athletes, and almost two thirds of the recorded abuse reached only two athletes. Sexist and racist content together accounted for more than half of everything identified.
The class adds that abuse follows underperformance and outperformance alike, the second where an athlete has violated an expectation about who should be winning, which points at the audience rather than at the athlete and makes conduct codes aimed at athletes the wrong instrument.
Representation, and holding two true things at once
The critical gender material is built on language evidence: men are mentioned around three times as often as women in sport media, the words clustering around women include age, marital status and pregnancy while those clustering around men are comparative and physical, and performance verbs divide into dominance for men and participation for women.
The class then works through a campaign that celebrated sportswomen through glamour styling and cosmetics sponsorship, and an advertisement that used an actress to sell a sports product and was answered publicly by elite athletes. Both cases support two readings at once, and the chapter argues that an analysis giving only one of them has not analysed anything.
What this chapter covers
- 01
Front stage, backstage and off stage, and what each region supplies to a brand
- 02
The branding model, its two marketing orientations and its two engagement outcomes
- 03
Why athletes post: bypassing gatekeepers, countering frames, branding and crisis management
- 04
What the engagement evidence rewards, and what supplying it costs
- 05
Composition and concentration of online abuse in one recorded study
- 06
Documented asymmetry in how sportswomen and sportsmen are described
- 07
Visibility as a disciplinary mechanism, and self regulation under constant observation
Write a policy that answers two opposite demands
- 3Show why the growth target fails on the engagement evidence.
- 3Show why the restriction fails on the same evidence.
- 3Give the three part recommendation and the measure.
Key terms
- Front Stage
- The region of self presentation in which a person performs a role for an audience and maintains an intended impression.
- Backstage Access
- Content from the preparation and private side of sport, valuable to audiences precisely because it is scarce, and the condition under which one sided bonds form most strongly.
- Athlete Brand
- The commercial asset built from an athlete's presented identity, modelled as content types feeding marketing orientations and consumer engagement.
- Concentration of Abuse
- The documented pattern in which a small number of athletes, disproportionately women, receive most of the abusive material recorded in a given event.
Athlete Branding and Self Presentation Online FAQ
Why is appearance led content a problem if it works?
Because the engagement evidence and the abuse evidence describe the same visibility. Studies report that appearance led and private content attract the most engagement, and a separate study of one Games recorded that most abuse reached female athletes and that sexist and racist content made up more than half of it.
An organisation that sets engagement targets is therefore asking athletes to supply something finite and is distributing the cost unevenly. The workable position states both, sets an objective the organisation actually wants, and names what it will not ask for.
What is the strongest version of an argument about athlete led media?
One that holds two things at once: social media is a real redistribution of who gets to speak, since athletes can bypass gatekeepers and present themselves directly, and it has not displaced the frames mainstream coverage uses, since the documented asymmetry in how sportswomen are described has barely moved.
Writing only the first sounds like a platform; writing only the second makes the athletes in the story passive, which the evidence does not support.
Assessment move
If your interviewee handles communications, ask what happens when an athlete is being abused, as a process question: who sees it first, who decides whether to respond, and what is kept. Many organisations discover while answering that the answer is nobody, the athlete and nothing, and that gap between a published duty of care and an actual procedure is one of the cleanest discrepancies available to a group report.
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