Abstract
Football Clubs from the CSL (Chinese Super League) have been noticed increasingly in the last ten years for their rapid development. However, the Chinese football environment and how CSL clubs brand themselves have never been examined at an multidisciplinary level, especially lacking is an investigation on aesthetic theories which take account of a Chinese perspective.In this dissertation aesthetics will be analysed using the CSL club websites. This research utilizes an observational and interpretive approach to analyse the cultural and art elements from the Evergrande and Luneng websites in two case studies, which argue Chinese football club branding is a multidisciplinary process with four main aspects: marketing, aesthetics, new media, and government, whilst brand communication permeates all these disciplines. Moreover, this research pinpoints brand identity as the key concept in this branding process and introduces the aesthetic sense of brand (ASB) as a new method to demonstrate how building a clear and unique ideorealm (aesthetic conception) is crucial to Chinese football club branding. Furthermore, this research also stresses the user-focused design and sports marketing from a new media aspect, as well as contextualizing within the present football environment and football governance in China.
This research outlines a panorama of contemporary Chinese football club branding. An original contribution on how brand identity has been developed from an aesthetic perspective and it reveals that the ASB in Chinese football club branding, should be focused on aesthetic theories, as well as theories developed from other disciplines, should be examined from an international perspective in future research.
| Date of Award | 26 Sept 2024 |
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| Original language | English |
| Awarding Institution |
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| Supervisor | Lesley Twomey (Supervisor) & Julie Crawshaw (Supervisor) |
Keywords
- Chinese culture and art
- brand identity
- website design
- football club brand