Identifying Iranian sport Human brand characteristics and the rate of social acceptance of it in the internal products marketing of Iran

Today sport celebrities are used as brand in marketing which is called as human branding. Thus the purpose of this study was to investigate if Iranians accept using people as brand for internal products marketing and also to identify the characteristics of a national human brand in sport. This research was a descriptive and Delphi research. The research population concluded of 45 panelists for Delphi method and three groups of university student athletes (N=322), sport coaches (N=196) and sport experts (N=100). The tools were two questionnaires. The validity and reliability of the questionnaire were approved. Also a factor analyzes method was used for the questionnaire. Results showed that using human as brand in sport marketing was not approval among population members. Also the characteristics identified for Iranian sport brands were similar to the western models in addition to religious, belief, magnanimity, and sport sprit, and moral behavior characteristics. So using human as brand in sport marketing is not an acceptable action among Iranians. But athletes can collaborate with Iranian producers if they can own the accepted characteristics.