Branding Yourself As An Athlete by Wendy Bailey

Wendy Bailey

Everyone has heard horror stories of an athlete with a tremendous upside who suffered a back injury or other career ending situation and was forced to spend the rest of his life struggling to make ends meet. Even a local athlete with a young career can take advantage of branding to ensure that opportunities within and outside the sport will continue to be available long after the active sports career is over.

Branding yourself can:

# Build Financial Longevity

# Help the Community

# Produce the Best Kind of Fan

Building Financial Longevity

It takes nothing more than a glance at the most successfully branded athlete in history, Michael Jordan, to understand the financial advantages branding can offer. While his last professional basketball game was in 2003, Air Jordan shoes are being manufactured and sold to this day. Imagine, a player who retired nearly a decade ago still making a fortune because his name is inseparable from his sport.

Even for an athlete without Jordan’s amazing global recognition, successful branding results in being able to move to coaching or consulting within the sport, or even into a broadcasting career where first hand knowledge of the sport is a highly valued commodity.

Helping the Community

There are two ways an athlete can successfully brand him or herself. The first is to be so incredibly successful at the sport that everyone with a passing knowledge of that sport is aware of that athlete. Such a successful athlete will find branding automatic because big advertising firms will offer endorsements and work toward creating the branding to maximize returns on their endorsement investment.

The second method of branding (the one that is available to every single athlete) is community outreach. Whether it is suiting up to visit the children’s ward at the local hospital or spearheading a community project like revitalizing a run down park, this kind of activity combines the best of both worlds because it makes life better for someone else and raises awareness of the athlete participating.

Producing the Best Kind of Fans

An athlete successfully branding him or herself creates the best kind of fans – the kind of fans who want to see him or her do well regardless of what career stage the athlete is going through. The average fan is a fair weather fan. Selling merchandise or being offered lucrative endorsement opportunities are effortless when the athlete is on top of the world. For an athlete who is not at the very top though, having a large enough fan base to still make those sales or attract those endorsements is something special.

Branding yourself as an athlete is about creating a connection between your sport and your name. By putting yourself out there and helping others, you build a following and increase awareness of yourself as an athlete. In a way, it means building your own fame. The simple truth is that anyone who is famous for positive reasons has financial opportunities that would not exist for that person otherwise. The relatively short careers athletes face make branding even more important.

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