Importance of Sports Marketing in the Modern Era

Importance of Sports Marketing in the Modern Era

INTRODUTION

Marketing through sport is a concept that emerged in the 1980s and showed a significant growth over last two decades.

Sport marketing has been a significant factor in boosting up the sports industry. With the passage of time, considerable growth has been observed in the field of sports marketing. Huge amount of revenue was generated in the year 2010, which encouraged the adoption of new marketing strategies with the objectives of maintaining and attracting consumers; and seeking out new revenues. Sports marketing include promotion of the brands through sponsoring events, promoting games by funding them, promoting using players and sports celebrity endorsements.

Modern Era

In this new era, the marketers are now more focused on the customer needs, more or less, related to sports. Secondly, people who play sports and who are interested in the sports programs are targeted most. New trend of signing agreements with sports companies to use their logos for marketing purpose has emerged significantly. Sports marketing has two components, first is application practices of marketing related to sports products and their services and the second one is related to consumer and industrial products.

Before going towards sports marketing, the marketers has to understand the relation between the product and service they are branding with the type of sports they are using. For example Rolex always brands itself with Golf, as Golf is an expensive sport. So Rolex targeted and positioned the high market segment, and targeted the right customers.

Sports marketing have two aspects, one is the actual marketing of sports products and services like bat, hockey stick, football shoes etc. and the second one is marketing some other products through services. (wikipedia). Sport marketing is very essential part of overall marketing strategy, as sports industry is very huge and is growing day by day.  According to Kearney now a day’s sports marketing is worth $480 to $620 billion, because of this reason we can’t deny the importance of sports marketing. Companies recognize that sport marketing is very powerful and it generates free publicity. (atkearney Publications, 2006)

In sports marketing the sponsorships is very important because sponsorships are the gate way for companies to enter the marketing of their products and services through events. In Cricket World Cup 2003 and 2007 the official sponsors were Pepsi and Hero Honda.

In the sports world Olympic Games is considered one of the mega events and provide a lot of opportunities to companies to advertise themselves using the concept of sports marketing. New brands can create their own equity and awareness with the help of sports events, which they sponsor and this also help brand as activation campaign. Bank Alfalah has been sponsoring different sporting tournament, especially cricket which is the most popular sports activity of Pakistanis and is thus a great way to advertise their product. Besides cricket they are also involved in sponsoring other games to contribute in the overall development of sports in Pakistan.

Sports marketing also help the companies to advertise their products or services in worldwide large events like Football World Cup, Olympic Games and others. In a nutshell, the major objective of marketers is to seek attention of their target customers. With the help of sports marketing, this objective can be easily achieved as it not only gets the attention of the customers but also the exposure time of the customers to the product is larger.

PRACTICE AND THEORY

Now, we put some light on the practices and theory of sports marketing. Although, sports marketing is an important tool for all businesses because of its capacity to generate huge amount of revenues for businesses but still it has not been yet understood properly and companies involved in sports advertising lack strategic approach.

In current practices of sports marketing every company try their best to use sports marketing because they know it will yield good results. There are few gaps left in current practices of sports marketing regarding to our selected brands “Pepsi” and “Bank Alfalah”.

The first gap that both “Pepsi” and “Bank Alfalah” use huge amount of money for sports advertisement due to which there other ads are not too much strong.. Both the companies can focuses on sponsorship and not focus on ambush marketing. Both should not sponsor high risky games like parachuting, skydiving and hang gliding. One drawback is also that people can’t give attention to advertisement too much during sports events as their focus is on game.

Although both brands are strong, so for both mutual sports marketing agreement is beneficial because this generate a lot of taxes for economy and also increase in number of their customers. The concept that company sponsoring losing team or losing star result in loss of their product share, is wrong because company always select those stars that are beneficial for company in both conditions winning and losing.

This study is limited to the young players and not shows legends in their ads, due to which they are losing middle age customers. According to study many companies fail to establish formal sponsorship evaluation systems or procedures but spend significant resources on sponsorship agreements. Both brands can’t advertise during traditional games. The other gap that we realized that they can’t sponsor schools and colleges sports events through which they can easily captured youth market share.

This research has been carried out by the following students of Bahria University, Islamabad.

Tayyaba Khan(TK), Mansoor Farooq Khan, Sheikh Zeeshan, Syed M. Sajid, Nida Mazhar, Usman Khan.

Short URL: https://www.newspakistan.pk/?p=24099

Posted by Asma Rafique on May 30 2012. Filed under Education, Sports. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.