Essay Strategies in the Sports Marketing Industry

After watching ESPN’s 30 for 30, Broke, my mind starting pondering this question of why and how so many professional athletes are blowing through the millions they make while playing their specific sport? It is amazing that someone can spend that much money so quickly. What are they buying and who are they buying things for? Where are they spending it? Where do they go wrong? When did this trend start and will it continue in the future? What are the league officials doing in order to prevent this tragedy from happening? These are some of the questions I will try to answer throughout this paper.

Sport agents typically handle contract negotiations for athletes, as well as any public relation issues, finance issues, and endorsement deals (Evans, 2010). Over the years, however, sport agents have become more to athletes than just a contract negotiator; they have taken upon the additional tasks of marketing their client’s ability, persona, and brand. With the increasing friction from collegiate athletes over the fact that they continue to be unpaid while simultaneously generating millions in revenue, agents look increasingly more inviting with the cars, money, and gifts they offer promising young

Another objective of sports marketing is creating sales. “The modern sports marketer is charged with one simple responsibility: to increase the sources of revenue” (Westerbeek 6). This includes obtaining more sponsors

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.

The NFL benefits from having football being a common conversation point in schools and workplaces. From fantasy football leagues to highly intricate betting in Las Vegas. There is not just passion, but dollars and time being invested by the end consumer. The NFL saturates Thanksgiving television, it’s players are often celebrities, its story lines are on the tip the American male. Knowing the game of football is often a rite of passage. Football is American tradition. The NFL clearly has it’s place in American culture. It is evident in the outpouring of corporate sponsors into the league. Companies recognize the visibility NFL players offer to their products and the NFL leverages that back into its brand. All aspects surrounding the sport are sponsored. From the sports drink the players slurp then dump on their coaches after victories—to the on-the-field tablets branded with the iconic window for drawing up plays. The jerseys, cleats, gloves, hats, helmets, pads—and that is just on the field. There’s food, cars, watches, headphones—it seems everything that scrapes past the NFL becomes sponsored in some way. Backing from the NFL appears to currently have exponential upside increasing brand awareness.

The primary sources for these revenues are from ticket sales, sponsors, broadcasting, apparel sales, and donations which all generate that money (Chait 1). Athletes are recruited to colleges because the coaches think they have the talent to help the team succeed in their sport. At Auburn University, Cam Newton received a full ride scholarship. He became the “star” quarterback for the team, which produced a lot of revenue for the football team and the university (Belson 1). The school thought of additional methods to create more profit, so they put Newton’s number on jerseys, sweatshirts, hats, and other wanted apparel. Those sales alone increased the profit margins enormously (Belson 1), and it all went to the team and the university. All the extra money that resulted from promotional efforts generated even more controversy. Questions arose, such as where to spend the additional funds, whether the school needed new athletic facilities, or even whether the star quarterback should receive a portion of the profits, and were debated. Both sides held passionately to their opinions, and the topic generated a strong response from people on both sides of the debate (Belson 2).

College Sports it is a huge part of most people’s life we cheer for teams our whole lives, we grow up watching them with friends and family. People spend an outrageous amount of money on games, apparel, toys, and things of that sort; Alex Moyer writes “With annual revenues exceeding twelve billion dollars, the college sports industry is the highest-grossing sports enterprise in the United States, consistently outpacing professional leagues like the NFL and NBA.” Now most of us know that college sports make a lot of money, but we often fail to think about the people who this company is built on. I am talking about the athletes themselves they put in countless hours of work and if you think about it without

Athletes and the sports industry have turned into a multi-billion dollar business annually. Stacked on top of that is that leagues and educational institutions receive multi-million dollar media contracts each year. This is so that broadcasters such as NBC, FOX, and TNT have the rights to broadcast that team or leagues games. The surge of money in the sports industry has led to an influx of agents into the world of agent athletes.

Branding is about establishing an image of how you would like to be seen and thought of by others. In business, for instance, those people are usually consumers. In other words, companies want clients to think of them in a positive light so they purchase their products.

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.

"If industry is to be successful in dealing with public opinion . . . it must learn the language of the people, it must consider the study of public opinion as important as any phase of its operations. It must recognize that public opinion can be measured, and utilize the increasingly scientific methods developing today for gauging it"(Ross)

“Sports are for fun, but they also offer benefits and lessons that carry over into all aspects of life”. This well-known anonymous quotation conveys the message that sport is the game which has some rules and custom. It is not only for fun and entertainment, but there are also some benefits of playing sports and which gives some important lessons for life. Every kind of physical sports is healthy because it involves running, jumping, stretching, mind skills and much more. There are so many sports available in the world nowadays, but we can categorize them by the numbers of players, the three main categories are individual sport, dual sport and team sport.

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.).