ABSTRACT
Marketing researchers have contended that brand passion is the ultimate emotional connection between consumers and brands. In sports marketing, however, the distant football fans belong to an understudied fan segment in relation to the passion that they have toward their favorite football club brands. Through the features of the Dualistic Model of Passion (DMP), this chapter serves to highlight the possible roles passion plays as a motivational force toward the distant fans’ football fandom. In the DMP, passion is defined as a strong inclination toward a self-defining activity that people like or love, find important, and in which they invest time and energy on a regular basis. Using content analysis, respondents’ comments were analyzed and associated with the seven features of the DMP passion construct. The features are distinctive activity, self-identity, enduring fondness, energy and effort, valued and meaningful, motivational, and adaptive and maladaptive outcomes. It was found that distant football fans self-reported these features in their behavior. Mostly, passion drives their consumption of football toward their favorite clubs. Lastly, the chapter calls for brand passion to be developed and used by clubs, and directions for future research are proposed.
