Impact of NBA Team Performance on Fan Engagement

Winning is the goal of a professional sports team, but does winning impact the local reputation of the NBA? Munoz showed that winning tends to boost attendance numbers (Munoz, et al. 2022). I use both localized survey data and passive behavioral data to see how the NBA's brand image and digital engagement change as the local team wins or loses.

I used data from three sources: A syndicated brand tracker (Harris Brand Platform) which measures intangibles that are integral to brand health; Samba TV data which provides us with passive viewing behavior of US TV viewers; and digital engagement data from a metered panel called Luth.

I aggregated the data by market to get the correlations of various metrics with local team performance, and also plotted these metrics over time against team performance.

Analyzing these disparate sets of data at an aggregate level revealed important insights, including:
- Performance in a single month is not as heavily correlated with digital engagement as cumulative season performance to date.
- The NBA's brand approval and reputation in an area were not correlated with the local team's performance. Being a better team increases local viewership, but it does not really impact the league's overall approval metrics in that area.
- Areas with no NBA team have considerably lower viewership than all areas with a team. This supports league expansion, as the increased footprint would most likely increase viewership.

Attendees will learn how syndicated brand tracker data can be used in conjunction with other key brand metrics to answer important business questions.

[1] Munoz, Ercio, Chen, Jiadi and Thomas, Milan. "Jumping on the bandwagon? Attendance response to recent victories in the NBA" Journal of Quantitative Analysis in Sports, vol. 18, no. 3, 2022, pp. 161-170. https://doi.org/10.1515/jqas-2020-0092

Time Series

Consumer Engagement

Data Visualization

Brand Tracker

Correlation Analysis 

Practice and Applications

Symposium on Data Science and Statistics (SDSS) 2024