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Sports marketing is one of the rapidly increasing and important areas of marketing communication. The international nature of the sport industry requires a global approach to sport marketing practices. Organizations need to grow a good understanding of the laws, regulations, values and norms of the countries and cultures in which they operate.
Nowadays, social media takes a key part of our daily activities. Whether sharing photos of our meals or anything on Instagram, browsing on Facebook or any other social networking media playing an important role in businesses and many companies nowadays have converted virtual.
The growth in the revenue of the sports market worldwide has been increasing for the most part over the last decade. According to a study by Statista (2015), the total revenue of the global sports market was $107.52 billion in the year 2006. The year 2014 was the highest revenue grossing year in the sports market with $146.47 billion in the last decade; while the year 2009 recorded the lowest which was 2.49 billion.
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The amount of money that is being generated in the sports industry is at its peak right now. Sponsorships, gate revenues, media rights and merchandising contribute to the growth of the sports market in a big way.
Further research is required, particularly from a professional sport team-branding perspective. In addition, the increased popularity of social media such as Instagram, Twitter, Facebook among sport teams, athletes and fans, combined with its potential marketing and branding implications as they mature, merits further exploration of this tool in the sport context.
Several scholars have called for additional empirical research across different social media platforms, particularly for marketing purposes and through longitudinal studies, and crucially, investigations of social media consumer behavior.
The present study answers these calls. Drawing theoretical insights from widely adopted sport team-branding models, we aim to analyze how two professional sport teams have used Instagram to communicate their brand image and its impact on the responses of their online following.
Sport teams that operate in an increasingly professionalized environment must keep adopting innovative branding techniques in order to maintain their brand image as both significant and unique from a consumer perspective and to differentiate it from competitors. Most professional sport teams now maintain an online presence on several social media platforms and increasingly expand to new ones.
Social media practices for sport organizations have mostly attentive on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter; while these platforms offer features for visual content interaction, they rely heavily on written content as the main communication medium for online users. Only recently have researchers started to explore the implications of tools that use visual content as their primary mode of communication. For instance, Hambrick and professional sport teams have established the extensive assumption of social media platforms, in an effort to nurture and maintain a way of interactive communication with their fan.
Kang (2015) discovered Pinterest (a media content sharing tool) under the lens of a relationship-marketing conceptual framework. Others have investigated how sport leagues can use Social media for agenda-setting purposes. However, less is known about the use of social media tools such as Instagram for building and communicating team brand associations. Some studies have examined the use of Facebook as a brand management tool in the context of US college athletics, the challenges in developing a social media branding strategy, or the use of Twitter as a brand management tool in the context of professional football teams. Studies examining Recent studies have examined how Instagram can be used for engaging fans for sporting, business as well as social objectives; as a self-presentation tool by Olympic athletes specifically, or by professional athletes more generally. More in relation to the present study, yet outside the professional teams’ context, Geurin-Eagleman and Burch (2016) found that sport brands that utilize user-generated content on their Instagram accounts elicit higher engagement from followers when posts have an overt focus on the product.
Using Web 2.0 Technologies in Sport Industry is another application in the sport industry highlights opportunities for Organizations to capitalize on developing Web 2.0 technologies to strengthen relationship-marketing approaches. The expanded model’s communication pathways highlight the need for sports organizations to pay attention to and then leverage the relationships they build with prosumers, both as customers and as intermediaries and influencers of purchase decisions. By leveraging Web 2.0 technologies, organizations can also satisfy not only their own requirements but also prosumer requirements as producers and consumers.
Further research is required, particularly from a professional sport team-branding perspective. In addition, the increased popularity of Instagram among sport teams, athletes and fans, combined with its potential marketing and branding implications as they mature, merits further exploration of this tool in the sport context. Several scholars have called for additional empirical research across different social media platforms, particularly for marketing purposes and through longitudinal studies, and crucially, investigations of social media consumer behavior.
Overall, this study has highlighted the evolving use of social media by sport teams to provide brand-related information and interaction with fans. Results revealed that the existing team brand literature can be applied in the social media context. In particular, all brand attributes of the adopted model were part of social media posts, albeit to a different extent. Teams using social media are able to produce and control their own news and stories and should identify the significance of giving fans a visions about their organizations, whether in the form of player/team news developments or information and activities beyond the playing field. All social media channels is capable of giving fans a more active role, either through the Comment feature or by sharing photos provided by fans through the official team’s channels. Fans recognize value in these transactions, and they subsequently engage by expressing their love (‘loving’), hopes and expectations (‘aspiring’), need for belongingness to the team (‘belonging’), but also their concerns (‘criticizing’) about organizational behavior (on and off the field). Therefore, we envisage that the insights of the present study will provide a much-needed access point into the discussions on brand management enhancement through social media in the context of professional team sports.
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors. With all these reasons, one can only think that sports marketing will be very good for the brand for exposure. Yes, I do agree that this will be a very good platform to reach out to a larger audience, however, without proper research and finding out the needs of your target audience, it would do more harm than good to your company. For example, in 2016, Manchester United captain Wayne Rooney was acting in a trailer for the latest X-Men film. The campaign was a failure, and the only thing it did was made many Manchester United fans upset as they felt that football was turning into a brand and not a sport.
To conclude, with the right idea and execution, sports marketing can help a brand get onto another level and gain recognition. Knowing exactly what the fans want and how their products or services can help the fans will certainly go a long way than just spending money and pray that people will be attracted to the brand.
Uses Of Social Media in Sport Marketing. (2024, Feb 06). Retrieved from https://studymoose.com/uses-of-social-media-in-sport-marketing-essay
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