The Importance Of Sport Marketing

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Marketing is a wide domain and is now a pillar of the corporate world (Skarmeas, Zeriti, & Baltas, 2016). The definition of it describes perfectly the multitude of aspects it takes into consideration “Marketing is the activity, set of institutions, and processes for creating, communicating, delivering, and exchanging offerings that have value for customers, clients, partners, and society at large” (Gundlach & Wilkie, 2009, p. 260). In the particular case of sport marketing, it is wrongly seen as a way to sell goods directly, sport marketing is about creating storytelling, enhancing products perception of customers through the uncertainty of a sport tournament (Beech & Chadwick, 2007). Consumers are rationales, marketers know well their memory …show more content…

This is why marketers affiliate their brands with celebrities, as seen earlier consumers’ memory is story-based, sponsoring a celebrity is buying a piece of history for a brand and allowing fast identification by consumers (Stotlar, 2009). McCracken (1989) has shown how effective could be the endorsement of a celebrity by determining the meanings that consumers would associate with endorsers and brands. As the sportswear industry is saturated in western markets companies have been looking at emerging markets for more than a decade, as the sport and entertainment industry became a global product, companies target international celebrities as part of their global marketing strategies (Ciochetto, 2011). This does not mean that all celebrities sell, in the pursuit of customer acquisition some companies fail to remember that the celebrity culture transfer may not affect customers, sometimes because the public does not perceive the correlation between the celebrity and the brand (Hung, 2014). A successful endorsement is a culture exchange, for the sportswear industry, the athlete gives his performances, his search for the best ones, his failures as well which if they can be overcome create great storytelling, on the other side the brand gives him prosperity, media coverage through adverting and sometimes posterity (Wu, …show more content…

The brand equity is intangible, but represents the perception of a brand from customers, sales can represent the effect of a certain marketing strategy over a short period, but the brand equity is not about short-term revenue (Ha, 2011). Companies seek to maintain at all time a high level of brand equity when expending, marketers in the sportswear industry monitor the level off the factors to understand where their brand stands and where they should focus according to the results for a long term performing brand (Sriram, Balachander, & Kalwani, 2007). These metrics have created new data for the marketers such as the Customer Lifetime Value (CLV) which is the current value of future cash flows of a customer during his relationship with the company (Stahl, Heitmann, Lehmann, & Neslin, 2012). The CLV is highly related with the customer loyalty, when expanding their marketing strategies, brands need to retain their base of customer, the physical evidence of it are the loyalty programs (Steinhoff & Palmatier, 2016). Customers are more likely to be loyal to a brand if they own a loyalty card, particularly in the retailing industry, it develops a sense of belonging from customers (Beck, Chapman, & Palmatier,

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