In order to analyse the organisation, it is necessary to understand the purpose, aims, and goals of an organisation in addition to the needs of an organisation’s stakeholders. There are four tools that help to do that:

• The Mission statements reveals the purpose of an organisation: why it was created. what services and products it provides, and to whom they are provided.
• The Visions statements is a written record of the desired achievements of an organisation in the future.
• Organisational Objectives are targets that must be reached in order to make the vision a reality.
• A Stakeholders analysis involves assessing the divers agendas of all individuals, groups, and organisations that have an interest in a sport organisation.

Next time, we will talk about the next step of the process of identifying sport marketing opportunities: Analyse market and consumers.

Enough theory for today! Tomorrow’s post will feature a US enterprise doing a great job at developing retail traffic driving promotions that leverage unique collectibles.

Source:

“Introduction to Sport Marketing: A Practical Approach” , Aaron C.T. Smith

• their own social networking online community: Planet Orange. The Planet Orange community is focused on user-generated content, with forums, posts from fan blogs and Twitter, pictures, videos, and online fans competition.
• their Facebook page with more than 35,000 fans.
• their Youtube channel with a nice player introduction video
• their Twitter Page which the team often uses to distribute tickets via a “Suns Twitter Trivia” challenge.
• their Shaq! (cf my previous blog post: “An example of how an athlete can turn into an online celebrity: Shaq attack!“)
• their virtual tour site: Suns Locker Room. This interactive site is full of humor (I love the monkey ahah , the songtrack fantastic and you really feel connected with the team while comtemplating the hall of fame. Great job here!

Add to these a variety of other features (blogs by Suns players and personnel, forum for podcasts, widget tools, etc…) and their successful Tweetup Night on January 16 and you get a team that perfectly combine online and off-line social media strategies to create intense loyalty among fans.

According to Amy Marting, “Interacting with fans across these online communities has opened up opportunities to do much more than just share scores and stats,” She adds: “Fans are getting to know us personally as the people behind the brand, and everyone seems to be enjoying themselves in the process.”

There is no doubts all these initiatives create more lasting relationships with fans. Go Suns!

Sources:

“Bonus online article — Tweeting up with @THE_REAL_SHAQ: Phoenix Suns PR pros embrace Twitter, social media”

“The Suns Influence Social Buzz With Special “Tweet Up” Event…”

“A Social Media Slam Dunk”

The first step of identifying sport opportunities is to analyse internal and external environments. To do so, marketers can use a set of practical tools:

• You can use a SWOT analysis to examine the strategic position of an organisation. SWOT stands for Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats. This tool provides a clear look at the “big picture”.
• The macro-environment of an organisation can be visualized using a six factors model. These factors are: Political, Economic, Legal, Technological, Social and Physical. It is important to understand the demands, constraints and possibilities that each of these elements migh bring to the sport organisation.
• The next step is to conduct a competitor analysis including immediate competitors (similar products meeting similar needs in a similar way), Secondary competitors (substitute products meeting similar needs in a different way), and Indirect competitors (different products that satisfy similar needs, or encourage consumers to seek satisfaction of different needs instead).
• In addition to conducting a competitor analysis, it is advisable to conduct a Five Force Analysis (Michael Porter). These five forces are: Intensity of rivalry among industry competitors, Threat of new entrants, Bargaining power of buyers, Bargaining power of suppliers and the Threat of substitute products and services.

The next step will consist in analysing the organisation. We will review this next step shortly. Stay tunned!

Source:

“Introduction to Sport Marketing: A Practical Approach” , Aaron C.T. Smith

Here is why I believe this campaign will be successful:

• Rob Dyrdek is a star not known amongst many casual sports fans, but one who is sure to resonate with young males who love skateboarding. This makes the overall campaign more “underground” and targeted to a specific community (and it is cost efficient too)

• Their online promotion area is interactive and compelling. It features very simple web 2.0 features but its design is not overloaded with superfluous additions.

• The fast food chain has extended this campaign into a sponsored safe skateboarding initiative in Southern California. The Social responsibility of the safety campaign is a smart addition to the messaging.

I have watched these videos three times each so I had to share at least one with you

Sources:

“The Hamburger Chain Uses A Skating Hot Dog To Grab The Young Demo…“

“Carl’s Jr. Teams With Skateboarder Dyrdek”

1. Sport good consumers: This category includes anyone who purchases a physical product that has a sport-related aspect or purpose.
2. Sport services consumers: These consumers utilise a sport-related service or experience excluding viewing or participating in sport directly.
3. Sport participants and volunteers: These consumers are actively engaged in sport as participants or in unpaid organisational and support roles.
4. Sport supporters, spectators and fans: The last category are made of consumers taking an interest in the performance of sport mainly, but not confined to, the elite or professional level.

Why does it matter to make this differentiation?

Sport Marketers need to appreciate the many reasons why consumers are motivated to buy sport-related products and services.The more that is understood about sport consumers, the easier it is to approach them with enticing marketing.

I tried to summarized these reasons here:

Psychological motives:

• Sport can be a stimulating, psychologically energising activity (For ex: 50cm powder + no one around + the last Burton Custom X board = adrenaline!!!)
• Sport can provide consumers with an escape from the ordinary routine of the life. Sport is a world of passion, spontaneity and uncertainty unlike often highly organised and regulated work environments.

Socio-cultural motives:

• Sport events and activites provide an opportunity for families and friends to spend time together (social interaction)
• Fans use sport as a form of cultural connection (for ex: sport can help fans connect to their national, racial, or ethnic culture).

Self-concept motives:

• Sport consumer may feel a need to belong to a group. (for ex: Fans want to feel part of a community that shares the same interest)
• Sport fans feel successful when their team is successful. It is called vicarious achievement (= sense of accomplishment through the success of someone else)

Today’s lesson: Remember that different sport fans will be motivated to consume sport for different reasons. It is our job to clearly segment the target market and adapt the message to them.

• Be passionate
• Gain experience
• Network
• Show a desire to learn
• Make yourself marketable

Are you passionate? What characteristics do you have to make you stand out among others? How can you distinguish yourself from your peers? Do you have what it takes?

Here is why I believe this campaign will be successful:

• Women will be sharing personal stories, helping the brand to build a community by connecting women to each other through real life stories. This campaign is based on emotion and passion, two specific features in sports (cf my previous blog post ” The importance of emotion & passion in Sports and its Marketing implications“).
• Candace Parker is a perfect partner for this campaign, as she is a role model to millions of femal-athletes around the world. She inspires women and celebrates individuality, confidence and motivation, values contemporary associated with success.
• Adidas use of multiple channels to reach consumers (online and in-store) will ensure that a maxium consumers are reached.
• The voting system engages their consumers and websites visitors. Moreover, Adidas has made this campaign viral by allowing participants to invite friends and family to vote for them via an online widget compatible with Facebook and other networking sites.

Emotion and passion are two special features of the sport industry. These have deep consequences that marketers must take into account:

• Loyalty can be very powerful but strong attachments to nostalgia and traditions can also lead to slow respond to market changes
• Sport organisations need to measures their success off-field (financial profitability) but also on-field (achievement within sport competition)
• Sport leagues and competitions are actually encouraging competitive balance, as sport consumers are more attracted to attend games where there is a balanced competition (think about the NBA Draft system).
• In competitive sport, there is a low cross elasticity of demand, i.e. it is difficult to substitute one sport league, team, brand or competition for another. That means that fans will continue supporting their favorite team (and purchase tickets and merchandises) even if its results are disappointing.

To illustrate how sports fans are the most loving, hateful, emotional, irrational, insecure and obsessive brood in the world, here isshort video from youtube

That last point has to do with the fact that sport consumers identify with teams, clubs, brands and athletes, and see them as extensions of themselves. The challenge for marketers would then be to bring business needs and emotion needs together.

More on this topic:

“Using sports to create a strong emotional bond“

” For love or money? The unrequited passion of the sports fan“

First of all, Shaq is Shaq. He is a big man, sometimes funny, sometimes stupid but always himself. Let’s have a look at the video of Shaq dancing at the 2009 All Star Game:

He is not a great dancer. But he obviously likes to dance. He is good at entertaining people. It’s not all about performance, it is also about fun. This video turned to be an incredible viral video, producing lots of conversation online and offline. You can only start conversation if you are close to your fans. In one of his message on Twitter, Shaq said “To all twitterers , if u c me n public come say hi, we r not the same we r from twitteronia, we connect.” He actually did meet people via Twitter. One fan, Jesse Bearden recounts on his “A foot and half blog” how he and his friend had an encounter with Shaquille O’Neal after a discussion over the micro-blogging social network.

This guy knows how to leverage social media to his advantage. In my next posts, I will attempt to demonstrate why stakeholders in the sport industry should get involved with social media.

More on Shaq & Social Media at “John’s Pick for Best Celeb Twitter User: Shaquille O’Neal“

“Sport Marketing is focused on meeting the needs of sport customers or consumers, including people involved in playing sport, watching or listening to sport programes, buying merchandise, collecting memorabilia, buying sporting goods like clothing and shoes, or even surfing a sport-related website to find out the latest about their favorite team”.

Definition from Introduction to Sport Marketing: A Practical Approach by Aaron C.T. Smith.

Make sure you differentiate:

• A sport consumer is someone who generally uses sport products or services
• A sport customer is someone who pays for the use of a specific product or services

The two angles of Sport Marketing:

• Marketing of Sport (products and services directly to sport consumers.
• Marketing through Sport (non-sport products marketed through an association to sport – athlete endorsements, event sponsoring…)

The Sport Marketing Framework provides a detailed explanation of the four stages of the Sport Marketing process:

1. Identify sport marketing opportunities
2. Develop sport marketing strategy
3. Plan the marketing mix
4. Implement and control the strategy.

I will make reference to this framework regularly, as it’s the barebone of successful marketing campaigns.

I haven’t a chance to illustrate these theories yet, but don’t worry, relevant examples and case studies are coming soon!