advanced theory and practice in sport marketing - Marshalls University

In order to effectively understand sport consumer behavior, sport marketing
professionals must understand the marketing concept, which is a consumeroriented
philosophy that suggests that satisfaction of consumer needs provide
the focus for product development and marketing strategy to enable the firm to
meet its own organizational goals. The development of the marketing concept
for sport is centered on three sub-concepts: sport production, the sport product,
and the selling of sport. The marketing concept focuses on two major groups of
sport consumers: spectators and participants. It also focuses on three individual
and environmental factors that have an effect on why people consume sport:
socialization, involvement, and commitment.
Problem solving and decision making techniques must be effectively utilized in
order to efficiently analyze sport consumer behavior. This will allow the sport
marketing professional to analyze how sport consumers determine what they
want, and how they set goals and objectives that result in making a choice. The
problem solving process is an organized, step-by-step approach that involves
brainstorming, formulating various solutions, analyzing all solutions to determine
a course of action, implementing the course of action, evaluating the success
of the course of action, and repeating until an optimal solution is reached. The
decision making process involves four views – economic, passive, cognitive,
and emotional – that form the foundation for setting and attaining goals. The
decision making process then focuses on pre-purchase decisions (problem and
needs recognition, information search, and evaluation of alternatives), decisions
during the actual purchase, and post-purchase evaluation.
Sport marketers utilize opinion leadership in order to influence the sport
consumer are opinion leadership. This concept focuses on the process by which
sport marketers informally influence the consumption actions or attitudes of sport
consumers. Opinion leadership seeks to pass marketing messages about the sport
marketer to as many people as possible, creating the potential for exponential
growth in the influence the sport marketer has, as well as exposure of the sport
product. This type of marketing is commonly called viral marketing. The five
major elements of viral marketing include giving away valuable products or
services, providing for an effortless transfer of the marketing message to others,
making it easy to scale the marketing efforts from small to very large, exploiting
common motivations and behaviors, and taking advantage of the resources of
others. Ultimately, sport marketers look at four key determinants of success:
(1) did the marketing program influence sport consumers; (2) did the advertisements
and other collateral materials stimulate sport consumer purchases;
(3) was the spread of information about the sport product via word-of-mouth
in an effective and controlled manner; and (4) was there a creation of a secondary
level of opinion leader to further promote the sport product.
The message is spread to sport consumers through either the diffusion process
or the adoption process. The diffusion process is where the acceptance of a sport
product is spread through communication channels to sport consumers over a
period of time. The four key elements within this process are the innovation of
the sport product, the sport communication channels, the sport consumer social
system, and the time period. The adoption process is made up of the stages
(include awareness, interest, evaluation, trial, and adoption) sport consumer
126 ADVANCED THEORY AND PRACTICE IN SPORT MARKETING