Editor’s note: Jon Last is president of Sports and Leisure Research Group, White Plains, N.Y. Christopher Whitely is director, research at Comcast Networks, New York.

In 2009, Comcast’s national sports cable network faced a challenge. It had rebranded and changed its name from Outdoor Life Network (OLN) to Versus in September 2006 to better communicate the network’s core focus around competition, rather than just the outdoors. Yet it continued showing large blocks of outdoor content, which were housed under the Versus Country umbrella. While the perception was that Versus was moving away from its outdoor programming offerings, the number of hunting and fishing programming hours on Versus actually increased 6 percent from 2007 to 2008.

However, endemic hunting/fishing advertisers began to perceive Versus Country as being “less pure” than competitors who maintained a 24-hour, seven-days-a-week schedule of outdoor programming. An examination a straight trending crosstab of syndicated data from 2006 to 2009 suggested that Versus viewers’ participation in outdoor activities was going down. (There was not a question in the syndicated studies asking respondents directly if they viewed Versus’ fishing and hunting programming.) At the same time, viewers of the competing Outdoor Channel did not display any decreases in hunting or fishing participation over the same time period.

This was counterintuitive and gave rise to a series of questions. Were Versus viewers actually participating in outdoor activities less or was the decrease a function of the network’s rebranding? That is, since the network was previously known as Outdoor Life, was the broader Versus brand diluting the true scope of outdoor programming on Versus?

There was no indication that viewers were becoming less engaged with the programming after the rebranding, as the audience to Versus Country’s programs continued to grow. Over the 2006 to...