How the NBA Built Its Brand into a World Beater

Apr. 01, 2020

These days if you go to any Asian or European city, find a sports fan or general member of the public and ask them who their favorite NBA team or player is and they will probably be able to give you an answer. Whether they’re a follower of basketball or they simply know of Shaquille O'Neal or Lebron James due to their respective social media activities, either way the brand, along with the athletes and teams who benefit from it, is undoubtedly growing in scope and reach. Here’s how the NBA left its rivals coughing in the dust when it came to marketing and brand strategy.

Which NBA franchise have you made your own?

• The NBA Works It on Social Media

Whether you’re on the 'gram, Tik Tok, Twitter or Snapchat you will have no doubt seen an NBA star or two strutting their stuff, whether they’re promoting their own line of clothing or just hanging out. However, it would be wrong to think that NBA stars being active on social media is something that just happened by accident. The league itself has been actively driving this, realizing that it is the players and their personalities that add major value to the overall brand banner. This has meant the NBA, far from restricting how its players use social media, instead of training them on how to get better at it, even encouraging emoji wars online.

• The NBA offers Up Action Year-Round

Most major sports function on a seasonal basis, with a regular season and an off-season. The downside of this is that the brand lags during the off-season meaning that many sports marketers get the feeling they’re starting from scratch at the beginning of every new season. Realizing that the world doesn’t just stop because the season says so, the NBA made sure to fill their off-season with media-ready content, namely from their NBA Summer League. The Summer League allows the NBA to continue driving the brand around the world while its major stars take a break, meaning whether you bet on NBA games or just like catching them with friends, the league is watching out for you.

• The NBA is Ready to Travel

Some of the NBA’s rival brands, namely the NFL, have often been accused of being insular and exclusive, making foreign fans feel left out by the league and its closely policed players. While many American fans are just fine with that, marketing execs must be pulling their hair out as they watch the NBA mop up fans in massive emerging markets such as China and India to name but two. Indeed, the NBA has become so prolific at spreading the good word of basketball on foreign shores that it was the most watched league in China in 2017, clocking an incredible 2.9 million video views during that season’s playoffs alone. It has done this by making clever strategic alliances with Chinese media giants such as Weibo and Tencent who in turn are hungry for the viral content that the NBA media machine churns out on a seemingly hourly basis. All this means that NBA fans be they in Shanghai, Tokyo, Rio or LA all feel equally connected and clued into the game they love.

• The NBA is Open and Diverse

As well as looking beyond the borders of its native country, the NBA has also sought to break down the gender barrier. It’s women’s arm of the sport, the WNBA, is becoming more and more enmeshed with the NBA, with male players regularly turning out to watch WNBA games and even some of their daughters and relatives beginning to breakthrough into the female franchises. All this means that the NBA is constantly looking at ways to expand the exposure it receives from different demographics, something that will surely stand the league in good stead in what’s an uncertain future for all sports.

Women’s basketball is being taken seriously by the NBA hierarchy