To minimize the damage elicited by crises, sport marketers can develop positive relationships with their consumers prior to crisis occurrence. Consumers often make associations with firms based on two dimensions referred to earlier, CA and CSR (Brown and Dacin 1997; Kim 2013). The first dimension, termed CA, describes the consumers’ base association with the corporate capability of delivering excellent products and services. The second dimension, termed CSR, refers to the consumers’ association with a corporation’s good image which was previously created by activities such as philanthropy. Prior positive associations can weaken the effect of negative information (Coombs 2007a; Godfrey et al. 2009 ; Kim 2013). As an example, suppose the Miami Heat had a positive CA association shield. Then, even if the Miami Heat’s coach were involved in a sex scandal, sport consumers might well keep attending the team’s basketball games as long as the Heat provided excellent performances for spectators. Damage reduction could also be viewed from the CSR association perspective. Hypothetically speaking, say Mizuno becomes involved in a crisis; if Mizuno has a history of actively engaging in socially responsible activities, consumers may think the cause of the crisis is not severe due to the prior positive image of Mizuno. This shield, which serves to minimize crisis damage, has been called insurance-like protection. The hypothesis underlying this concept has been consistently supported (Ducassy 2013; Eisingerich et al. 2010; Jo and Na 2012). Although social concerns and CSR have been widely investigated in the sport management realm (Babiak et al. 2012; Babiak and Wolfe 2006; Inoue et al. 2011; Zeigler 2007), scholars would do well to further examine the effectiveness of social marketing in the sport crisis management context.

In addition to pre-crisis damage minimization, sport entities must also deal with impacts after crises occur to further alleviate the damage. Coombs and Holladay (2002) proposed various response strategies that practitioners might utilize. The most effective strategy depends upon the particular situation. In the deny strategy, an emphasis is placed on claiming that the scandalized object was not responsible for causing the crisis. The diminish strategy is useful when marketers want to decrease the seriousness of a crisis. In the rebuild strategy, an apology is made and compensation provided in order to maintain positive relationships with the consumers. Finally, the bolstering strategy can be utilized as a supplement to other strategies. It involves emphasizing past blameless behavior and anything else that will win stakeholders over.

Although a number of studies have been conducted outside of our discipline with regard to crisis response strategies (Benoit 1997; Coombs and Holladay 2008; Liu et al. 2011; Schultz et al. 2011), in the sport management realm, there is minimal research examining the effectiveness of response strategies. In one case, Fink et al. (2009) examined fans’ reactions toward a sport team when the one of the team’s athletes was involved in a crisis. They found that high identification fans prefer the team to clearly dissociate the responsibility of the individual athlete from the team whereas low identification fans were less concerned about particular response strategies. As I have mentioned before, despite the frequent occurrence of sport scandals, we still lack the knowledge that would allow us to respond to sport crises in a systematic, effective way.

Crisis management in the sport management realm is still at an infant stage. In this chapter, I summarized potential negative outcomes that sport crises can generate and described the unique characteristics of sport crises. I also put forth a crisis management minimization framework to understand the ways of alleviating crisis damage. Incorporating the ideas and findings introduced above, several future research opportunities are identified below.

It is critical that sport organizations as well as athletes engage in developing positive associations with sport consumers. For instance, several scholars in the sport management realm advocate the importance of CSR (such as philanthropy) as important strategies for developing advantageous strategic management approaches (Inoue 2011; Babiak et al. 2012). In addition to the usefulness of CSR in marketing, the positive association with sport consumers can produce a “doing good” shield which will contribute to crisis damage minimization. The effect of “doing good” shields should be examined in different, relevant settings. Athlete scandals and sport negative publicity, for example, have not been adequately examined from the CSR perspective. Empirical studies on this topic are needed.

With regard to crisis response strategies, the available literature mostly involves methods for determining the best response strategy (Coombs and Holladay 2008). However, as Kim et al. (2009) insist, this view is limited in the sense that practitioners may need to combine multiple response strategies at any given time. Therefore, scholars should strive to establish the effectiveness of multiple response strategies. In addition, it is also important to determine the most effective order of response strategies. I propose the utilization of two-sided message response strategies (e.g., Ein-Gar et al. 2012; Rucker et al. 2008) as well as message framing (e.g., Kim and Cameron 2011; Shiv et al. 2004) for future research that is addressed at answering the above questions. Furthermore, corporate-oriented research needs to be extended. Kim et al. (2009) documented that denial strategies are not effective, but unfortunately corporations still utilize this outmoded technique. Corporate decision making strategies in response to sport and other crises need to be examined. Empirically generated data should be produced, and from it comprehensive response trees created for each of the major crisis categories.

As a final note, although crisis damage minimization is emphasized in this chapter, we should not forget that the best scenario for the sport industry would be to have no sport entities involved in crises. Scandal prevention should receive attention as a future research topic. Factors driving sport entities to engage in misbehavior, and preventative measures that preclude such misbehavior, should be investigated. By accumulating and applying such knowledge, effective crisis prevention programs that sport organizations, team owners, sport equipment oriented corporations can use will be developed.