Brand Attachment and Agile Marketing: Responses to the (Post-)Pandemic Context in the Sports Fashion Context

Introduction

Agile marketing represents a new marketing management approach based on an array of practices aimed at solving the rigidities of traditional marketing (Gera, Gera, & Mishra, 2019). According to Moi and Cabiddu (2021), notably, agile marketing encourages a firm’s teams to work together on common objectives centered around (e.g. sports fashion) customers’ needs. For instance, social networks have already been perceived by companies as a great mechanism to help them reach their marketing goals and goals, especially in aspects such as customer engagement, customer relationship management and communication. In this context, agile marketing is an approach to marketing that utilizes the principles and practices of agile methodologies. This includes having self-organizing, cross-functional teams doing work in frequent iterations with continuous feedback. It requires a strategic vision, as well as short, medium, and long-term marketing planning (Ferreira & Sousa, 2020). According to Moi and Cabiddu (2021), the current literature does not well elucidate the advantages and benefits of adopting agile practices in marketing and their impact on improving current marketing capabilities. Agile marketing refers to an approach to marketing, where marketing teams work together to come up with high-quality projects that will foster group efforts. Agile marketing allows marketing teams to quickly publish content and modify it based on performance. Agile marketing is a trans-departmental activity that brings together members of different departments to take advantage of marketing opportunities and change marketing plans based on a dynamic environment (Sachdeva & Kumar, 2022).

This study aims to clarify to managers and practitioners how they could become more agile, improving their marketing performance in the sports fashion industry. A qualitative study was carried out, in which two types of interviews were developed, in which both had a previously prepared questionnaire. The first applied to the physical stores of the sports brands: Nike, Adidas, Puma, Reebok at the Vila de Conde Outlet – Portugal and at Decathlon in Guimarães - Portugal, where those responsible for the stores were interviewed, seeking to understand the impact of the pandemic on brand communication with your consumers. For the consumer survey, a focus group was selected with 8 participants, who were divided into 2 groups, 4 Brazilians and 4 Portuguese. The interview was conducted in an online meeting room, being recorded to maintain the veracity of opinions, choices and preferences of products and their brands. The main point of this research arises as an investigation into the behavior established between consumers and brands, the affective relationship and loyalty to their preferred brand. The purchases that at the time were no longer in person and, now through websites, as it turned out, there was an increase in purchases, there was a change in terms of values or the consumer's relationship with the brand remained in loyalty. Therefore, this research seeks to understand the impact of the pandemic on online sales of sports brands and their relationship with consumers. Agile marketing capabilities are cross-disciplinary across people, roles, and departments that strive to continually update, improve, and innovate resources and skills to bring greater profits to customers through constant awareness of and response to market changes. The results obtained showed that the brands adapted to the pandemic period, they managed to preserve and even strengthen the relationship and communication with their consumers due to their online platforms, in which their sports products were found due to the high demand during the pandemic, especially in the period of confinement. In addition to realizing the importance of contact with companies during the period of confinement, which helped maintain the connection and loyalty between brand and consumer. The present study represents an important contribution regarding digital and agile marketing and the importance of the relationship between brand-consumer, namely the consumer's attachment to the brand.