Top Ten Most Effective Sports Marketing Campaigns

Introduction

Sports marketing is a relatively new field and dimension within the broad concept of marketing. It is constantly evolving and changing today as society battles the free market to decide the legal and ethical boundaries of business today. It is import ant to note that this discipline within marketing is not clearly defined. Sports today utilize corporate sponsorships and television money in order to compete and pay for top quality athletes. Those companies use teams, leagues, colleges, and individual s to differentiate their products in a very competitive business environment. What constitutes sports marketing to one person could be considered "selling out" to some critics. The business world keeps pushing to find a competitive advantage an d the sports world has generally welcomed the money offered. Every level of sports from peewee leagues to the pros has been affected by the sports marketing trend. It will be difficult to point out where it all began or where we are today in the develop mental cycle, but that is still easier than figuring out what will happen to this emerging discipline.

Discussion

To date there are few if any real sports marketing texts published. Most attempts at this type of text use sports as an example of how to market using the four P's (Product, Place, Price, and Promotion). Mullin, Hardy, and Sutton's Sports Marketing and Pitts and Stotlar's Fundamental of Sports Marketing are the only examples of college sports marketing texts and both have similar faults. They examine how to use sports to do basic marketing, but lack the important history and cr eativity that are crucial to understanding today's field. In addition these texts seem to miss the question: why sports marketing? How to market sports is an important but simple question with relatively clear answers. Why is a more difficult di lemma, and the answers are constantly changing. There are so many reasons to use this means for marketing that I can not begin to find them all, but a future sports marketing text should be able to cite motivations behind actions more than methods for em ploying those actions (Whannel, PP 11-181).

I have included a timeline of what I feel are important events in the forming of sports marketing as a more recognizable marketing strategy. These are events evident to me in my studies, yet you may know of omissions or debate the importance of others. Until more academic books on this field have been written, there will continue to be a wide range of opinions on the subject so I make the disclaimer that this is merely an interpretation and not something to be considered definitive (Ukman, pp 11-181).

As early as the 1870s, tobacco companies made cards of baseball players and inserted them with packs of cigarettes in order to try and boost sales or develop brand loyalties. The tobacco industry has had a huge impact on this country's past in several arenas and sports marketing is no exception. These cards ...