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Chapter 3

Through my secondary reading I devised the following testable statement "A positive corporate image is vital to the success of English football clubs", this was based on my knowledge of the football industry and from reading the works of Smith, Olins, Yan and Kotler. This clearly reflects that an image for a business is important as it display's the brand to the external audience. With football club's competing in an ever increasing violate market arena, corporate image is a major way for the club to ascertain a unique position over the competition and create differentiation.

There were two research methods used: questionnaires and interviews.

I devised the questionnaire in order to gain information of a quantitative nature; an interview was then developed to obtain qualitative data.

• Quantitative data is "data about how many people hold similar views...enables generalisations..."
• Qualitative data is "data about how people think and feel"

Questionnaire: This was used in the hope of collating information on a vast scale throughout the industry. I sent the questionnaires through the post and obtained results back that way. Arsenal asked me to telephone them and they 'filled-in' their questionnaire over the telephone. The questionnaire was a two-sided 10 question format, with the objective of finding information on corporate image, if it was needed, the reasons behind an image strategy, financial implications, the response of the supporters and the overall implementation. It is hoped that by using this method the hypothesis can be proved on a large scale and using this method is linked to: 

Interview: This was used to obtain more in-depth information. It linked to my reading through asking details about the catalyst of change, target audience, importance and customer characteristics. This created two sources (Manchester City (see appendix 19) and Leicester City (see appendix 20)) of personal responses. To also add depth to chapter 2, I also contacted Jack Yan (a corporate image consultant) (see appendix 21), with an in-depth list of five questions and through him I collated some qualitative data on the corporate image mechanism. During the creation of the interview to the football clubs I tried not to include too much jargon concerning corporate image and to Jack Yan I included very little about the industry (football) I was researching in a hope form Yan I would obtain general data on corporate image. To save on cost and time the interviews were sent out via electronic mail. I constructed the interview in-line with:

Who should receive the questionnaire was important to me. I was aware of the emotion related to the football industry and so wanted to random sample the 92 clubs. I wanted to gain a mix of clubs by geographic and divisional status and this I am happy to say happened. I achieved via the questionnaires, representatives throughout the Football League and the Premier League and from throughout England. I obtained a list of all football clubs and their addresses and although I sent out 35 questionnaires, I was disappointed with a response rate of 43%. Therefore I issue caution over the questionnaire results, as it displays only a 16% view of the population available. To supplement this I sent detailed interviews to two clubs who said they would be willing to help me.

Thanks to Leicester City and Manchester City problems with the interview side of my research were kept minimal. Although I did have to redesign the interview as Leicester (who received the interview first) felt that there were too many in-depth questions in it to answer due to time constraints. However as with Manchester City, Leicester filled in the redesigned one.

The questionnaire proved to be more problematic. Although the design of it was fine (I tested it on 4 people to see if it could be navigated without problems), finding the addresses of the clubs were elementary, I found that football clubs were not very helpful in returning the questionnaire. I even sent six out with stamped addressed envelopes in an hope that they would be returned, but only two sent these back. In total I sent out 35 questionnaires and received just 15 responses. I also sent out e-mails to 10 clubs and received just two responses back.

Although the response rate was low, it is clearly not possible to generalise but an indication can be made concerning the issue of corporate image within the football industry.

The problems were addressed by contacting Jack Yan, to obtain further details of the corporate image debate and also by reading various sources linked to football clubs, such as the Bradford City Fanzine, the Huddersfield Town match-day programme, information from 'inside' Arsenal, Leicester City and Tottenham Hotspur.

Through the participation of the football clubs and Jack Yan I was able to collate a substantial amount of primary data to supplement my knowledge obtained from secondary sources. Although problems were incurred during the primary research stage, at all times I tried to lessen the effect by consulting other sources of information. I used a sample random method to test the hypothesis and generally I was pleased with the way the research methodology progressed. The problems furthered my education of how to overcome external barriers the researcher has no control over.

Such was applied in order to obtain the results, which follow in the next chapter.

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