In the sports industry, marketing has evolved significantly, and the evolution or shift in marketing techniques and strategies is the reason the past marketing strategies are referred to as traditional marketing while the modern and novel techniques are referred to as sport marketing. To begin with traditional marketing, sports companies as well as entities were rigid, and that means they only used proven advertising and promotional activities (Geraghty, & Conway, 2016). The main media used to target fans to attend games included posters, billboards, adverts in the local dailies or just quick promotional announcements on television. Usually, with the television, the message will be short and brief; announcing to the target audience when the game or games would take place, the place, and the teams that would be involved. Secondly, traditional marketing would only target the local audience. Perhaps the most prominent reason for such a narrow target was that the relevant stakeholders did not recognize the potential of the sports industry. People seemingly thought that only local fans were interested in their gaming events and not the large global audience.
It is also important to mention that traditional marketing mostly took part in a time when technology was not as developed as it is presently. The internet gradually developed beginning from the early nineties and its growth increased especially in the last decade. Therefore, the world was less connected; hence it was not very possible to target a global audience in traditional marketing. With a connection to a smaller audience or fan-base, there were also little prospects from the various sports (Geraghty, & Conway, 2016). Besides, the prominence of a sport like football seems to have increased in the 1970s after the world cup in Mexico where television pictures were shown in color. Therefore, traditional marketing was limited mainly due to obsolete technology and less connectedness among people in the world.
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In sport marketing, which is quite prominent in today’s sport industry, many channels are explored to appeal to the target audience. One of the best channels currently is the internet, where many sports magazines, websites, and blogs discuss and analyze various sports events (Shank, & Lyberger, 2014). The emergence of social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter have contributed greatly to the growth of the sports industry. For example, hashtags are very common whenever various teams in the world play. However, TV rights can be said to have changed advertising and promotion campaigns especially in a sport like football. For instance, DSTV, a South African company, seems to have earned almost exclusive rights to air live English Premier League games in Africa. This revolution also signifies a change in the sports audience; from a local audience to a global audience. To a large extent, the UK seems to have realized the effectiveness of sport marketing because the English Premier League is arguably the most popular football league in the world. The popularity of the league seems to come at the expense of other country’s football leagues because the EPL has fans in virtually all countries around the world.
Additionally, in sport marketing, there is a confluence between advertising and entertainment. Fans or the audience are made to connect emotionally to the game (McCarthy, 2015). This aspect of sport marketing is mostly evident in the numerous TV sport shows. The hosts of these shows bring to the panel the various sports experts or even former players to analyze a game before kick-off. While the panel analyzes the games, replays are shown on big screens, and this strategy makes the audience to anticipate for the game. Therefore, sport marketing tries to appeal more to a wide global audience and make them feel part of the game, as opposed to traditional marketing techniques, which used monotonous techniques, with little or no creativity.
References
Geraghty, G., & Conway, A. (2016). “The Study of Traditional and Non-traditional Marketing Communications: Target Marketing in the Events Sector.” https://arrow.tudublin.ie/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1075&context=tfschmtcon
McCarthy, A. (2015). “Sports marketing success lies in predicting the unpredictable”. https://www.theguardian.com/media-network/2015/jan/30/super-bowl-social-media-marketing
Shank, M. D., & Lyberger, M. R. (2014). Sports marketing: A strategic perspective . Routledge.
