About Michael B. Devlin, Ph.D.: Michael B. Devlin is Professor and Regents’ Teacher of Advertising in the School of Journalism & Mass Communication at Texas State University. Dr. Devlin’s research focuses on social identification and personality, with an emphasis on fan identification with sports teams and its implications for sports marketing, sponsorships, and advertising.
Dr. Devlin’s publications have appeared in notable sport communication, sport advertising, and marketing journals, including Communication & Sport, International Journal of Sport Management and Marketing, and Journal of Sports Media. His scholarship has been recognized with a Lawrence Wenner Emerging Scholar Award from the Communication and Sport Division of the National Communication Association, a Presidential Distinction Award in Research from the College of Fine Arts and Communication at Texas State University, and top faculty paper awards from the International Communication Association and The Broadcast Education Association, among other accolades.
Dr. Devlin is the author of the textbook Creative Thinking & Concepting in Advertising. His title of Regents’ Teacher reflects his selection as one of the leading educators at Texas State University. Texas State has also recognized Dr. Devlin’s pedagogy with a Presidential Award for Excellence in Teaching. As an advisor for Texas State’s National Student Advertising Competition (NSAC), he helped lead the school to several district championships and one national championship.
Dr. Devlin holds a Ph.D. in Mass Communication from The University of Alabama and received both his M.A. in Mass Communication and his B.A. in Electronic Media and Communication from Texas Tech University. Prior to entering academia, Dr. Devlin worked as a multimedia marketing specialist for National Instruments.
Interview Questions
[MastersinCommunications.com] May we begin with an overview of your academic and professional background? How did you become interested in sports media, mass communication, advertising and marketing, and their overlap in sports marketing?
[Dr. Michael B. Devlin] I spent a number of years after college working in advertising as a multimedia marketing specialist. In that role, we were exploring emerging media. It sounds silly to call it “emerging media” now, because this was over 20 years ago, before Instagram and TikTok. MySpace was still popular. The iPhone had just launched. We were researching how people were using video and multimedia technologies online by studying Twitter when it was using SMS technology to upload tweets, and apps were non-existent.
Working in academia came as a bit of a surprise. It was not part of my career plan. In 2008, I was transitioning between two advertising agencies. I had used my remaining paid time off from my former employer to go abroad and visit my family in Germany. When I came back, the market had crashed. I landed in the United States to several voicemails from the agency that I was supposed to work with. I returned their call, and they said, “Unfortunately, we have to rescind your job offer. We lost two of our major clients because of the economic crisis.”
I found myself in a limbo situation without a job, wondering what I was going to do. Fortunately, years before that, I had met Jennings Bryant, former ICA President and Distinguished Professor Emeritus at The University of Alabama, who passed away in 2020. I received a Top Student Paper Award from The Broadcast Education Association when I was a master’s student. During that panel, he said, “If you are ever interested in pursuing a Ph.D., let me know.” When the market crashed, I took that lifeline. I reached out to him, and that led to an opportunity to go to The University of Alabama to pursue my Ph.D.
I was very lucky. My intention was to ride out the economic crisis, study media effects, and eventually return to the advertising industry having made the most of that opportunity. But, while I was there, Dr. Andrew Billings joined our faculty. He brought a lot of energy and passion to our courses in sports media, sports marketing, and sports communication. He helped me understand how my professional background in advertising could be applied to critically understanding sport marketing and advertising strategies. Why was it important? How can we creatively get people engaged? It heightened my level of curiosity and drive to understand the psychological and social considerations that shape consumers and fans.
[MastersinCommunications.com] Your research has been focused on personality types and social identities of sports fans, especially as they are relevant to marketing strategies like branding, sponsorships, endorsements, and advertising campaigns. Could you highlight some of the major findings of your work with respect to the personalities and identities of sports fans and the applied significance of these findings for sports marketing?
[Dr. Michael B. Devlin] I come from the creative side of advertising, where our job was to create content that was engaging, meaningful, and useful to our target audience. One of the things I enjoyed about that work was looking at the consumer and trying to understand them. Understanding what is going to get someone’s attention and move them in the right direction has always helped me develop content.
When I got into my Ph.D. program, it seemed like a natural fit to investigate sports fans as an audience and explore what makes their level of passion so extreme. What does their willingness to cover their cars with team logos, wear branded hats and clothes, buy merchandise, and post on social media say about the role sport plays in their identity? Why do we do this?
This type of fan, which we call “highly-identified” sports fans, became a fascinating demographic to study from the consumer perspective. This was a market that I think many of us took for granted at that time. I wanted to ask deeper questions about these fans. Was there certain messaging that appealed to these fans or incited highly-identified behaviors? Is this a behavioral or a personality trait? What can we do from an advertising perspective to really understand what makes these people tick? I also wanted to understand why certain fans stick by their team even when they lose.
A lot of my initial research was not very novel. Daniel Wann had done a lot of great work on fan identity, drawing from research on cults and group-think. From my advertising background, I was interested in how we could monetize this by tapping into these fan psychologies. Advertising budgets are often tight. If we can understand the fan, we can also better understand their motivations and what is going to get them through the next behavior or action. We can develop strategies and messaging in a more intentional way, without just throwing ideas at the wall to see what sticks. We can create more novel, more useful, and more successful advertising.
Sports gave me a great opportunity to focus on a highly segmented audience: one that was demographically wide but, when you looked at their behaviors, very narrow. In advertising, we tend to segment audiences based on gender, age, socioeconomic status. What is the unifying factor between a 60-year-old man and a 16-year-old girl who root for the same team? What is happening that we can draw from? How can we identify unifying themes that predict mass identification and mass behavior? Can this be something that spreads outside of sports or that we can apply in other areas?
One key idea that I kept coming back to was personality. Wann’s work largely focused on the need to belong to a group, but a lot can be said about the distinction between someone who wants to belong to a mild-mannered book club and a group of sport fans who will paint their faces and scream for over an hour with others. That led me to examine how underlying personality traits dictate which type of groups we would want to belong with.
[MastersinCommunications.com] As you mentioned, your work in this area has often focused on what you call the “highly-identified” sports fan. Could you discuss some of the varying personalities and behaviors you have associated with these fans, such as narcissism, and forms of social identification like “Basking in Reflected Glory” and “Cutting Off Reflected Failure”?
[Dr. Michael B. Devlin] The identity of sports fans becomes tied to the successes and the failures of their team. For a long time, from an academic and a practitioner’s perspective, we studied sports to see who was buying merchandise. I wanted to look at what drives us to do that. My biggest question started with my mother. She belonged to a book club, and I asked what they would do if the author of a series they liked wrote a bad book. Without hesitating, she replied “Oh, we just wouldn’t read it.” Even though they were fans, they felt like they could come and go.
This has important implications for how we think about brand loyalty. If a major brand like Starbucks has a crisis or a decline in product quality, you might be likely to say, “I’ll go get my coffee elsewhere.” Sports is unique in the sense that when your team has a bad season, or if there is a crisis, many consumers are willing to say, “It is not the team’s fault. Next year will be better.”
In sports, fandom becomes part of one’s identity to the point that they will continue to support their teams even as they lose again and again. I wanted to understand the traits that allowed people to sustain the cognitive dissonance of accepting failures while maintaining loyalty. What is that psychological side that keeps us invested in our favorite team that may be underperforming, that may not be meeting our expectations? Relatedly, I wanted to examine how success and failure changes this fan behavior, the differences between highly-identified fans and fans whose loyalty was rooted in the team’s success, and how this might impact ticket purchasing and sponsorships.
[MastersinCommunications.com] Could you tell us a bit more about some of the main explanations your research has found for the unique behaviors of highly-identified sports fans?
[Dr. Michael B. Devlin] As I noted before, Daniel Wann has done an amazing job of looking at the social groupings from a sociological perspective. His work represents the well-accepted position in sports scholarship now, which holds that people identify with sports teams out of a desire to feel like they belong to a group. I wanted to dig underneath that to understand what underlying factors drive us toward certain kinds of groups, as in the example of my mother’s book club discussed above. What is it about the identity of sports fans, in particular, that pushes people to think so emotionally, and become so economically and socially invested, in ways we do not see in other commercial enterprises where we spend a lot of our financial and social capital?
It took several years of effort to convince other people in the academic community this was an area that was worth pursuing. I received a number of journal rejections when I started trying to integrate psychological perspectives on personality with these well-accepted ideas about identity, which were largely rooted in a sociological perspective. I kept pursuing it with study after study, until finally I found some traction. My research after 2016 focused on the psychological profiles of people who are willing to invest financial capital in an opportunity to see a sporting event, when there is no guarantee how they will feel at the end of that event. I wanted to understand the type of person who would spend $1,000 to see a game knowing, if their team loses, they are going to be upset.
I have conducted a number of studies to follow up on this question with my co-author and wife, Natalie Brown-Devlin, whom I met in my doctoral program at The University of Alabama. After exploring different cases, we have seen a number of trends emerge in the personality profiles of highly-identified fans. One is modesty, rather a lack thereof. These are people who want to brag about their team winning, which is described as “basking in reflected glory.” People who lack modesty love to flaunt success, and sport invites that behavior when your team has a win.
We have also observed a high degree of flexibility, in terms of their cognitive ability to justify losses and wins. A flexible personality type means that you are not rigid. Fans tend to think in terms of justification: “My team lost, but here’s why,” or, “My team won, and here is why.” This flexibility is a core attribute among highly-identified fans.
Over time, we kept seeing these trends, and we were able to start building a personality profile of what characterizes a highly-identified fan. The goal for this research remains to build on the sociological perspective by investigating what personality factors drive people to being a sports fan uniquely, versus being part of a coffee club or a church group, because the behaviors are completely different when you look at the outcomes. We are trying to take complex theories from sociology, psychology, and the behavioral sciences, and meld them to help explain that phenomenon.
[MastersinCommunications.com] A number of your publications investigate global sports competitions, where one of your key concerns has been the ways in which fan identity interfaces with nationalism — for instance, “‘My Country is Better Than Yours’: Delineating Differences Between 6 Nations, National Identity, Fan Identity, and Media Consumption during the 2018 Olympic Games.” What drew you to the Olympics as a unique space to explore sports fandom, and what has your research revealed about the connections between the social and national identity of fans in this context?
[Dr. Michael B. Devlin] My work in this area builds on Dr. Andrew Billings’ research on how our identity drives the media we consume. My research on the World Cup, in particular, was aimed at understanding the inverse question of how media consumption can be an antecedent for identity-based responses.
My work focused on the 2016 World Cup, which was a tournament that the United States was not expected to win. Despite that, there was a heightened expectation for success when the games began that was based on a popular sentiment of American exceptionalism: that, because we are American, we win at everything. You could see that trend related to nationalism progress as the tournament went on. As the U.S. team was having mediocre results on the field, the level of national identity increased among fans. Then, when the U.S. National Team was eliminated from the tournament, you saw a huge spike in smugness and nationalism that was measured on an us-versus-them type of scale. We saw a lack of acceptance of internationalism after being eliminated.
This study helped us understand how consumers respond when their identity is threatened by an obvious loss. We saw responses along the lines I mentioned before, where people would say, “Well, we lost, but…” People rationalized the loss by saying, “Maybe we’re not good at soccer, but we’re still the best country.” From that, we concluded that it was not simply that we are driven to media that will support our beliefs and our identity; when our expectations are not met, we will respond in ways that protect our identity. It is the proverbial, “I am taking my ball and going home.” We saw the same thing happen in our work on the Olympic games. The audiences we studied expected our teams to win, and when our teams were upset, the response would be, “Well, that sport doesn’t count,” or “We’re still America.”
There is a distinct sense of wanting to protect one’s national identity. Whether you are a Democrat or a Republican, you likely still have a degree of national identity and pride. We want the country to do well on the world stage. When our teams do not perform to expectations, we fall back on the idea that we are still America. In this way, these international competitions provide a compelling case for understanding American exceptionalism.
We see how people personally invest in sport as a stand-in for their national identity, and move to protect their identity from the United States’ losses. It makes sense, from both a personality and sociological perspective, that fans respond to losing by trying to defend or recuperate that sense of national identity.
[MastersinCommunications.com] In more recent work, you explored the relevance of your research on sports fans to understanding contemporary politics, as in “It’s All About My ‘Team’: What We Can Learn About Politics from Sport,” and “Voters are Starting to Act like Hard-Core Sport Fans–with Dangerous Repercussions for Democracy.” Would you explain your argument that politics in the United States resembles sports fandom and how this may present a threat to democracy?
[Dr. Michael B. Devlin] On the one hand, I am excited to see that we now have both parties excited in the electoral process. You have seen voter registration and voter turnout substantially increase in presidential elections over the last decade. On the other hand, I believe that we are seeing a trend that I began to notice in 2020 and continued into 2024, wherein people do not vote for a political party, one way or the other, based on policy issues. Instead, voters are more driven by their identity. They identify candidates that they like, and they become part of their team. This sense of team identity becomes deeply ingrained, to the point where voters are buying merchandise, yard signs, and shirts, which double as advertising for their candidates. They approach politics from the perspective of wanting their team to win.
Unfortunately, some of these people are voting for policies that are going to negatively affect them because they have been misinformed. But, when confronted with the facts of how a policy will affect them, we often see people react in a manner that is very consistent with how sports fans defend their teams. In sports, if a team cheats, their fans will often say, “They didn’t really cheat, they just did what they were supposed to do,” or “I don’t care as long as we got the win.”
However, if that team’s rival cheats in the same way, those same fans will vocalize and criticize that opposing team. We saw this in 2020 with Stop the Steal. The electoral process was objectively upheld, but the claim still emerged that the other team was cheating. The referees had fixed the outcome of the game. But, in 2024, when the election went the other way, supporters of the Republican Party represented the electoral outcome as fair. The referees were suddenly honest.
This returns to what I said before about how sport serves as a great context to understand behaviors that have much broader cultural, social, and political significance. Once you are invested in a team — whether that is your local sports team or your political team — you are part of that team. You are going to buy the merchandise. You are going to follow the media that confirms your beliefs and your biases, and you are going to discount media that comes from “the other team.”
This is true on both sides. Democrats have not gone to the extreme of undermining the electoral process and storming the capitol building. Still, after the 2024 election, there were many highly-identified supporters of the Democratic Party calling into question the results of the election. The behaviors are different, but the inquiry is still there. It is also important that, when people on both sides of the aisle talk about these electoral outcomes, their focus is not on policies or democracy as a whole, but rather on the victory or loss of their team. When a political party wins, people feel like it is their identity that won and feel better about who they are as people.
We can learn a great deal about democracy from sports and vice versa. There are now decades of research on social identity, personal identity, and their relationship to team identity that tells us that, if I belong to a group, I want to see my group win at all costs. If I see my group lose, I am going to blame others. Unfortunately, we are playing a dangerous game when these dynamics apply to democracy, because this is something that has much greater implications than any sport. We are now dealing with issues that affect people’s lives.
I am glad to see that the increased role of identity in democratic politics has excited the electorate and increased democratic engagement, but the danger is that team identification can lead us to the sense that our team can do no wrong. You saw this with Joe Paterno and Penn State. The sexual abuse of children is an unforgivable offense, but a huge swath of highly-identified Penn State fans dismissed the allegations and said, “We support our coach and our program.” That type of identification applied to a political party is a tremendous threat to democracy, and I believe we are seeing that in our political culture today.
[MastersinCommunications.com] You were recognized as a Regents’ Teacher at Texas State University, and are the author of the textbook Creative Thinking and Concepting in Advertising. Your pedagogy has also extended beyond the classroom, as you have served as an advisor for Texas State students who won the National Student Advertising Competition. Would you tell us about your focus on creativity in advertising, and how that informs your award-winning approach to pedagogy?
[Dr. Michael B. Devlin] I come from the creative side of marketing and advertising, and the main thing that I learned through that experience is that creativity is universal. Creativity is about solving problems in a novel way. This is necessary for advertising, but no matter the context we are in or the situation we are approaching, finding a way to address problems in a novel way that accomplishes our goals is invaluable.
The main aim of my textbook is to dispel the myth that creativity is only useful to the arts. I encourage my students to understand that creativity is about trying to find a new way to solve a problem. There are many commonalities between my work in advertising, trying to solve clients’ problems, and my approach to working with students to think about the problems that we are going to be facing and how we can approach them in a novel way. I try to give them goals and tactics that will allow them to brainstorm and communicate. Novel problems require novel solutions.
In my courses, I typically employ many low-stakes performances early on in the semester. I encourage them to fail. I know it sounds unorthodox, but I say, “This is a 10-point assignment out of a thousand points of your entire course. This is worth nothing.” To some extent, you need a point total with students because they are goal-oriented and want clarity on their grades. Still, I want to encourage them to take risks. If it fails or does not work, it is not going to harm you. I want you to take that leap.
I think my approach to teaching is very different from many other people’s. What allowed me to earn a Regents’ Teacher award here at Texas State is that I do not teach from a rubric. I do not say, “If you do this, this, and this, you get the A.” I am going to give my students the space to operate, to fail, and try new things. It is amazing to see what happens when you give students that space and move away from the rubric perspective that so many of them are accustomed to. My approach has always been to let them fail early and often with very low-risk assignments, where I reward them for great ideas and risk tasking, but failing will barely impact their overall grade.
I want to move away from standardized testing. Many of the problems of No Child Left Behind and the [George W.] Bush-era educational approach stem from a reliance on standardized testing and the associated drive to make everything measurable and objective. The world is not completely objective. We are not talking about math. A client may not know what the final answer is going to be. You may surprise them. Take that risk.
When you remove concern over the grading scale, it encourages students to take risks and work to solve problems in creative ways. We should give students a space to fail in the classroom so that they learn how to deal with failure and respond with creativity and innovation before they get into the workforce, where failure, or fear of failing, can have real, detrimental effects.
This is transferable to how I approach advising the National Student Advertising Competition Series. We have a curriculum we work with that focuses on understanding the basics of identity, psychology, and sociology and applying them to advertising. More importantly, however, I think our team has the confidence to take a risk — to meet a novel problem with a novel solution. I think that is what has allowed our students to consistently out-place impressive schools like The University of Texas at Austin and Texas Tech University in competition, and I am very proud of them for that.
The most important advice I would give to other educators is to let students fail in a way that does not penalize their grades. Build a space that helps students get comfortable with being uncomfortable. In the advertising industry, no client is going to tell you how to do your job. That is why they hired your agency. They want you to solve a problem that they cannot figure out. The only way to do that is to approach it from a new direction. If we only teach our students to abide by the syllabus and reproduce textbook answers, we are not preparing them to know how to solve the new and pressing problems that will emerge in their fields.
[MastersinCommunications.com] Based on your experience and expertise, do you have advice you would give to students interested in sports communication, mass communication, advertising, or marketing, who may be considering pursuing a graduate degree in communication or a related field?
[Dr. Michael B. Devlin] From a practical perspective, I would encourage graduate students to understand the role that artificial intelligence (AI) is going to play in education and the labor market and develop tangible skills working with AI. It does not matter what context or field you are working in. Understanding generative and predictive AI will be pivotal. This means not only understanding how it changes our behavior or organizations from a research perspective, but also understanding how to use it in the classroom for assessment and working with students.
AI is a great tool if you use it the right way. Understanding what we can do and what we cannot do with AI is going to be increasingly important when it comes to instructional jobs and research positions. As a reviewer, I have already seen scholars submitting work who are using AI basically as a co-author to analyze tweets or posts. AI can be a brainstorming partner that is on hand and available. I would encourage people to dive into this new technology. It is not going to go away.
For students interested in sports communication scholarship, I think it is important to recognize the value of sports as a window into understanding a wide variety of other issues. We may have a singular target when we talk about sport, in that we are discussing something concretely defined: an organized game between two or more people with an objective, a winner, and a loser. Further, as my research has focused on, sports audiences are often unique with respect to their psychological profiles. Still, sport remains a great lens through which to understand a wide variety of issues. Sport is a common denominator that nearly everyone has engaged with in one way or another, and can be researched in a variety of contexts, from advertising and sponsorship to social issues.
Think about the 1968 Olympic Games when Tommie Smith and John Carlos raised a black-gloved fist on the medal podium to highlight social and racial inequality. Think about today, when sport has become an important space for protest, as well as a site where dominant ideas about race and gender and systemic inequities are still reinforced. I want students and other scholars to understand that sport is a window into understanding social, economic, and political issues, as well as a sandbox to apply approaches from other disciplines, whether economic, political, psychological, or sociological. You can say, “I’m not a sports fan,” but sports and sports media still impact you and the world you live in.
Thank you, Dr. Devlin, for sharing your insight on sport communication, the psychology and personality of sports fans, the role of creativity in marketing and advertising, and more!
Please note: Our interview series aims to represent the diverse research being pursued by scholars in the field of communication, which is often socially and politically engaged. As a result, all readers may not agree with the views and opinions expressed in this interview, which are independent of the views of MastersinCommunications.com, its parent company, partners, and affiliates.
