A sport team’s merchandising is a critical factor in its ongoing revenue generation, and proper licensing ensures that sports organizations are able to protect their income-generating potential through the sale of their branded products. Not only are professional and often collegiate team names, logos, and league trademarks licensed, but even athletes’ names and likenesses can be licensed by player associations. Licensing agreements direct the vendor in the merchandising process, specifying quality standards, timeframe of production, projected profits, and royalties to be paid to the team, athlete, or league.

For this assignment, focus on the sports team you selected in the Topic 1 and 3 assignments and rebrand the team’s merchandise with the goal of increasing sales. Refer to the demographic data of your selected team’s fans (provided in the applicable “Instagram Demographic Analysis,” located in Course Materials) to inform your rebranding plan.

When making your plan, consider the role licensing will play in brand recognition and your marketing strategies. The project will have two parts, a written report detailing your plan for the rebranding program and a PowerPoint presentation with accompanying pitch explaining the rebranding plan to league and team officials.

Rebranding Plan Paper
Compose a 750-1,000-word paper outlining your approach to this team’s rebranding initiative. Include the following points in your paper:

Explain why you are rebranding the team’s merchandise.
Using data such as fan demographics, sales, and information related to brand recognition, justify the necessity for rebranding. How will rebranding the team’s merchandise draw in more fans, increase sales, and make the brand more recognizable?

Describe what the rebrand will look like: Will it entail a change in team colors? Logo? Mascot? How will this contribute to the overall goals and image of the team? What merchandise will this affect? Will any new merchandise be rolling out to promote this rebranding?

Provide details about the specific steps you will undertake to rebrand, license, and market this merchandise. Focus on finding innovative ways to use technology and social media in the rebranding process.

Provide cost and revenue projections for the plan.
Explain the metrics you will use to evaluate the success of the merchandise rebranding.

PowerPoint Presentation
For the second part of this assignment, create a 6-10 slide PowerPoint presentation that summarizes your merchandise rebranding plan for presentation to team stakeholders or league officials. The PowerPoint slides are intended to serve as a visual aide to supplement the content of your presentation, whether you are presenting in class or adding your speaker notes to each slide. As such, the slides are not a space to reiterate verbatim the content of your paper. Utilize the presentation slides for showcasing persuasive graphics, images, tables, and graphs that will bolster your pitch and help you sell this rebrand. Include relevant talking points in the Speaker Notes section for each slide in the PowerPoint.

Your presentation should include the following components:
Introduction (1 slide): Team name, location, and current logo or brand.

Problem (1 slide): Reason for rebranding.

Rationale (1-2 slides): Justification (fan DNA, analytics, etc.) for rebranding.

Concept (1-2 slides): Introduce new logo or branded design; support why you believe it will be more successful than the current brand.

Return on Investments (1-2 slides): Projected revenue projected costs = projected profit.

Evaluation (1-2 slides): Metrics for measuring the rebranding’s success.

After you have completed the written report and PowerPoint, practice the presentation you would make about the rebranding plan to team stakeholders and decision makers.
Use Loom to record your presentation and submit the Loom file to the instructor. Refer to the study materials for additional guidance on recording your presentation with Loom.
Submit both your paper and PowerPoint presentation as one assignment.

Refer to the resource, “Creating Effective PowerPoint Presentations,” located in the Student Success Center, for additional guidance on completing this assignment in the appropriate style.

While APA style is not required for the body of this assignment, solid academic writing is expected, and documentation of sources should be presented using APA formatting guidelines, which can be found in the APA Style Guide, located in the Student Success Center.

This assignment uses a rubric. Please review the rubric prior to beginning the assignment to become familiar with the expectations for successful completion.