Sports Marketing And Finished Off With A Personal Reflection

The Cleveland Indians fans have earned the reputation of being extremely dedicated and loyal to their team. According to Rosko (2016), Cleveland Indians’ fan base was ranked in the top 250 in the world. It is no secret that the baseball team has a devoted following, but it does beg the question who are these fans? The followers of the Cleveland Indians’ brand will be segmented into groups based on their demographics and geo-demographics. For the Cleveland Indians, this will entail categorizing consumers into groups based on age, gender, family size, and region.

Advertising is a huge part of today’s society and today, we are engulfed by a cosmetic world of advertising, playing with our opinions like a child with their toys on Christmas; they can make us think how they want us to think. Now this world has taken over the Beautiful Game too and it’s going full speed to the centre of it. In stadiums, advertising boards surround the pitch, using bright animations to get crowd’s attention; while on TV screens, companies have huge sponsorships with the major competitions like major bank Barclays partnership with England’s Premier League that lasted fifteen years up until the current season. Naming rights, like the Emirates F.A Cup, a historic 100-year-old trophy, now named after an Asian airline company create this image of history being taken over by commercialism, a metaphor for the new football.

The business of sports is one of the fastest growing industries in the country. All over the world, many people participate as players and spectators in a variety of sporting activities, creating opportunities for the marketing of a company’s goods and services. An important part of the business of sports is sports marketing, which revolves around understanding consumer behavior and motivating target markets to purchase goods and services. Sports marketing at Clemson University has many different aspects ranging from sports and technology and sport law to sponsorship and sports economics.

Professional sports has become one of the most popular industries in the world today. The media spends billions of dollars on advertisements and teams spend millions of dollars on professional athletes all for one reason, the fans. The fans ticket sales and merchandise purchases are what keeps all the sport teams around and prevents professional athletes from losing their jobs. There are three types of fans in the sports world, average fans, fanatics, and fair-weather fans.

People getting arrested, drunk, and in fights for a game? People all across the world attend sports of all kinds. Fans can not always be the nicest or like the other team but that shouldn't stop you from being a fan or going to a game. Infact it’s good to be a fan of a certain team, studies showed that if you have strong liking of a particular team it can actually make you a healthier, happier, and more social person. So if you don’t particularly like a sport just turn on your tv and try watching some type of sport who knows you might just like it.

What is the only thing harder than disciplining a dozen ten year olds? Disciplining them on ice! All throughout my life I’ve played sports, and no matter what sport it was, there was always one person who seemed to have it out for me…the referee. The referee is one of the most hated people in the world of sports, but is also one of the most crucial. I grew up with the mindset that the referee was the enemy. Whenever they made a call against me or my team, they were always wrong, no matter how obvious the penalty was. But one day, my whole perspective on referees changed---the day I became a referee.

1..An American Apotheosis, written by Joseph L. Price, discusses the religious element of sports. His thesis, “For tens of millions of devoted fans throughout the country, sports constitute a popular form of religion by shaping their world and sustaining their ways of engaging it.” (Price, p. 196) Takes on the difficult challenge of defining sport as religion. This is done through Price’s exploration of how sports shape and engage the world for the millions of devoted fans in America, how sports enable participants to explore levels of selfhood, how sports establish a means for bonding with the devotee community, how sports model ways to deal with fate while playing by the rules and how sports provide the prospect of experiencing abundant life.

Secondly, when an athlete first steps on to the pitch they instantly form a bond with every single member of the crowd that came to watch them play. This bond however can not only be good, but it can be bad as well. According to A Psychoanalysis of Sports by Dustin Ervin, “The sport is the stage, athletes the characters, and crowd the audience” (Ervin 33). In simple terms, the crowd acts as audience that comes to see the athletes “characters” play. The athletes preform their sport on the field. Now if you ever have been to a play or have seen one in cinemas, you would note that the audience can show multiple attitudes towards the film based upon how it presents itself. This is the same for crowds watching athletes on the field. If the crowd approves of a particular athlete’s performance, or the team as a whole, they will erupt with cheers and applause. However, if they detest the performance that they are given, boos will be heard around the stadium. The athlete’s performance is also based around this feedback. If the crowd is booing the athlete then he or she might simply perform poorly for the rest of the match. But, if the crowd is cheering the athlete on the urge to keep pleasing the crowd grows as does the performance of the athlete.

Marketing plans and strategies are an important part of almost any business today. One of the biggest industries marketing plans have benefited and changed in a number of different ways is the sports industry. The development of the sports marketing industry has led companies to invest millions of dollars to have their product associated with specific teams, players, and sporting events attempting to connect with consumer and create profit for both parties involved. The money involved in sports marketing calls for these sponsorships and endorsement decisions to be made both strategically and confidently. After researching the sports industry from a business perspective the importance of marketing decisions is

This article continues to explain that once a sports marketer creates a product and advertises it on a small scale, “Sports marketers get ahead by gradually representing bigger, more important and more prestigious sports teams, companies, associations, and athletes.” In other words, sports marketers need to have a plan of action to promote their product on a larger scale over time. Also, sports marketers spend much of their planning on the aspect of promotion. Mihai verifies that the category of promotion serves to prove that the product is desirable through advertising, sales, sponsorship and public relations. If a sports marketer follows these planning steps, his/her work will lead to a successful product with a large margin of profit.

The price that we pay is the value that we associate to any product, whether it is a good or service. It is the compensation given to a person or authority to purchase an object or service. The greater the value associated to the product, the greater the price.

Sports’ marketing is becoming more readily known as the vehicle that drives the sports business to success. It is “orientated toward consumers and about thinking, deciding and acting in terms of the final consumer. You have to know who your consumers are, what they want and need and use this effectively as a sports marketer orientating the drive more toward the market, not the product (Sports Marketing: The motor that drives the sports business

Through market research, Nike found the most impressionable consumers were these Football Obsessed Teens. Generally, these teens were around 17 years in age, Nike’s target age. Nike felt that the “17-year-od consumers were more independent, more driven in their football goals, could choose their own brand, buy their own products and form brand loyalty.” However, Nike recognized that this change would require an adjustment in their marketing efforts. Primarily, these consumers were not just “aspirational” but rather “inspirational,” a type of consumer that will want the tools to become the best possible player.

“In matches between the two groups of football teams, the teams from the same state as the umpires received more favorable decisions than the other teams did by a margin of 11% for the 171 games studied.” In situations where the umpires had to allocate rewards to members of a group they identified with competing against a group they did not identify with they clearly favored their ingroup. This study helped proved the theory that intergroup competition is a prevalent reason why ingroup favoritism is often exhibited in society. This idea is completely embedded into the entire sporting culture of our society today. We group ourselves together with the “home team” or the ingroup. We prefer for that group, as well as ourselves by association, to be successful. The second explanation that is usually offered is the idea that people will have a better opinion of people in their ingroup in order to boost their own self-esteem by association. Robert Cialdini conducted a very interesting study on a concept called Basking in Reflected Glory (BIRG) at several different universities. In order to study how self-esteem was a determinant of ingroup bias, Cialdini and his team researched the behavior of students after victories and losses of the school’s football teams. Their results “Demonstrated the BIRG phenomenon by showing a greater tendency for university students to wear

Sports' marketing is a comparatively new field and dimension within the broad concept of marketing. It is continuously evolving and changing today as society combats the free market to decide the legal and ethical limitations of business today. It is significant to note that this discipline within marketing is not clearly defined. Sports today use corporate sponsorships and television money in order to contend and pay for top quality athletes. Those companies use teams, leagues, colleges, and individuals to make a distinction between their products in a very aggressive business environment. What makes up sports marketing to one person could be considered selling out to another. The business world keeps pushing to find a competitive advantage and the sports world has in general welcomed the money offered (Weikel, n.d.).