Resumo

The cultural perspective has proved fruitful for expanding brand managers' strategies, especially those that offer mass-media products, such as the sports marketing segment.

Among the leading sports brands, the National Basketball Association (NBA) has emerging consumer markets worldwide. It is the example of Brazil, with an exponential increase in interactions about the league on social networks in which the fans produce knowledge about the brand they consume. In this sense, the study aims to understand how the interactions in the social networks of Brazilian NBA fans produce cultural brand knowledge.

The study discusses the production of cultural brand knowledge through the interactions in social networks of fans of mass-media products.

A netnography was conducted through monitoring and analyzing NBA Brazilian fans' virtual interactions between 2018 and 2021 on the most emblematic social media among the league audience, a Twitter hashtag: #NBAnaESPN.

The results allow discussing the possibilities for brand managers to incorporate the secondary sources that sustain and maintain the cultural meanings for their consumers, which impacts the adapting of its brand equity strategies.

The four secondary sources of brand knowledge are revisited from a culturalist perspective, considering the nuances of social network interactions.

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