Sport Branding Insights

In a sporting world dominated by media and money, an understanding of sport branding is an essential skill for any sport manager. Success means being able to ‘brand’ – and therefore differentiate – a sport club, player, code, or event in a highly competitive entertainment market. For anyone seeking to understand or manage sport, this book offers an immediate and salient insight into the complex and dynamic process of creating a powerful sport brand. The book explains how a sport brand goes beyond just an identifying badge, reinforced by a name or a logo that helps sport consumers recognise a product or an organisation. It reveals how a brand becomes linked with consumers’ opinions and perceptions of a sport product and the organisation that owns it. Readers will learn how to create a powerful brand that has both recognition in the market and strong associated imagery, by imbuing it with a spirit of the past through appeals to tradition, by endowing it with human qualities of emotionality, thought, and volition, and through the use of characters, colours, texts, and symbols. It also provides a brief guide to the new domains of digital sport branding and social media. Concise, informative, and entertaining, this is an essential resource for anyone exploring or practising the business of sport.

This edited text compiles advanced material relating to strategy and marketing in the field of sports business. Featuring contributions from experts across the sports business field, the book approaches strategy from the standpoint of managing and marketing a brand. With integrated current-day examples highlighting practices and issues, as well as ‘real-world’ applied video cases, this book is ideal for marketing students and sports business practitioners looking to gain strategic insights into the industry.

For courses in Sports Marketing. Help students understand the business of sports through a practitioner’s perspective. Written from the perspective of those who’ve been actively involved in the sports business, Sports Marketing addresses business and marketing issues pertinent to sports as observed by the practitioners and scholars themselves. Through its extensive presentation of current information, this text also helps encourage students to get actively involved and engaged in the process of sports entertainment. Features: Present information from the field: A practitioner’s approach. Most sports marketing texts are crafted using a marketing principles template. The organization and chapter themes of these texts are often too similar to Principles of Marketing texts. Sports Marketing strives to depart from that practice by focusing on important conceptual, strategic, and actionable areas of the sports marketing function. Practitioner contributions come from the author team, and a high caliber roster of successful sports executives from media, marketing, and other areas of sports business. Industry experts highlights. Each chapter features an industry expert. Each expert was selected based on his or her knowledge and provided input on chapter content. The Insider Expert feature that appears early in each chapter gives biographical information on the chapter’s industry contributor. Sports examples. Throughout the book, concepts are reinforced with examples of practices and events from the sports industry. A variety of sports, properties, and companies are used as examples to bring to life definitions and concepts presented. Put students’ analytical skills into play: Critical thinking exercises, which are found throughout this text, require students to consider various situations faced by the sports marketers and sports executives. The end-of-chapter sports marketing cases put students in the role of decision maker, enabling students to apply knowledge and key concepts to business situations faced by actual sports brands. Expert insights. Each chapter concludes with Insider Insights, a question-and-answer feature with the chapter’s industry contributor. In this feature, experts share examples of best practices from their experiences and opinions about trends in sports marketing. Preview the chapter’s game plan: Lead-in vignettes. Each chapter begins with a vignette related to sports marketing and the content of the chapter. The vignette describes a practice or occurrence that illustrates a topic appearing in the chapter, setting the stage for more in-depth coverage in the chapter. Get students ready for the big leagues: Career planning. Many students take a sports marketing course because they have a serious interest in pursuing a career in sports business. In order to help students plan for their future careers, the final chapter contains: -Information about different career opportunities in sports marketing. -Steps students can take to position themselves as job candidates. -Advice on career planning and management from a panel of the book’s industry experts.

Effective marketing is essential for any successful sport organization, from elite international teams to local leagues. Now in a fully revised and updated third edition, Advanced Theory and Practice in Sport Marketing is still the only text to introduce key theory and best practice at an advanced level. This new edition goes beyond the introductory marketing course by exploring advanced marketing theories related to social responsibility, global issues, information systems, consumer behavior, product management, logistics, sales, promotions, and social/digital/mobile media. New to the edition are sections on branding, destination marketing, and performance evaluation that demonstrate how to measure impacts through sport marketing and how to use analytics to determine sport marketing success. Every chapter contains extended case studies and theory-to-practice insights from marketing professionals around the world and a companion website includes an impressive array of additional teaching and learning resources. Advanced Theory and Practice in Sport Marketing goes further than any other textbook to prepare students for the real world of sport marketing. It is essential reading for any upper-level undergraduate or postgraduate course in sport marketing or sport business.

The Sport Business Handbook provides perspectives from more than 100 of the most prominent figures in the sport industry. Plentiful examples and stories, including insiders' views of major sport deals, make this book a bible of information for those looking to advance their careers in this field.

This book examines contemporary sport marketing, with a particular focus on strategic marketing, the process of longer-term planning and development that involves identifying the needs and wants of potential customers and satisfying their needs through the exchange of products and services. It presents cutting-edge case studies from around the world, including from the United States, China, Europe, the Middle East, South America, and Africa. It considers some of the most interesting emerging themes and topics in contemporary sport business, including fitness marketing, the role of sustainability in sport marketing, social media and digital marketing, athlete-brand relationships, and the promotion and development of collegiate and scholastic sport. As a whole, this volume presents a snapshot of the opportunities and challenges facing sport marketers around the world. Sport Marketing in a Global Environment is fascinating reading for any advanced student, researcher, or professional working in sport business and management, sport development, marketing, strategic management, or global business.

This book introduces the fundamentals of sport governance, assuming no prior knowledge on the part of the reader. It explains to students and practitioners alike why governance matters and how it can be better practiced in sport organizations. Introducing key concepts and the micro-processes of implementation, the book explains what governance is and why it has become increasingly important. It explains what sport boards do, and how they should function for sport organizations to be effective, and it provides practical tools to help ensure good governance. Full of insights from cutting-edge research and real-world cases, this is essential reading for any student or practicing sport manager, administrator, or policy-maker who needs a concise introduction to this important topic.

Sponsorship is a vital area of contemporary sport business. This book offers a concise and practice-focused introduction to sport sponsorship, including an explanation of key concepts, a survey of the key tools required to be a successful practitioner, and insights into real-world practice from authors with extensive industry and academic experience. Covering sport at all levels, from professional to grassroots, and including international cases and examples throughout, the book demonstrates that sport sponsorship works if done correctly. Drawing on the latest cutting-edge research, it introduces the core principles of sport sponsorship and shows how to get maximum value at each stage of the sponsorship process, from plan to activation, servicing and evaluation, for sponsor, property or agency. Requiring no prior knowledge of sport sponsorship, and full of real-world examples of best practice, this is the perfect primer for any student or industry professional looking to improve and deepen their understanding of this core element of modern sport business.