In Between The Lines of Sports Marketing Samantha Timmons University of North Carolina at Charlotte

Defining and Persevering To The Audience Sports marketing is the promoting of athletic teams and events and the methods of promoting and marketing, whether it is through social media, free giveaways, or events. Sports marketing has become one of the most influential effects of college athletics; some say it is just as important as the actual sport itself. Think about it, how do you even know what time the game is? Where the game is? How do you hear updates about your favorite team? How do you know where to get your favorite teams gear? How do you know what the logo of the team looks like? Well thats what sports marketing is all about. Appealing to your attractions, youd be surprised at what entails in marketing. You are apart of marketing just as much as IMG, International Management Group a global sports and media business or ESPN, or any marketing department for a college or university. Just by talking about sports, wearing shirts and jerseys for your favorite college team, posting an update about your favorite team through your Facebook, twitter, and Instagram. Marketing is all around you; you just dont realize it because it's an unconscious act these days. (Funk, 2008) When companies think of marketing strategies the first question they ask is, who is our target market? Take a look at the demographics that attend the events and control your marketing through those details. The Chicago Cubs divide their fans into seven segments, upcoming renovations to the ballpark will allow benefits targeted to those loyal and valuable customers, such as different concession options on the club level. More than 60 percent of Cubs fans started following the team before the age of 12. Therefore, the importance of engaging the young, loyal fan base is the most valuable long-term. Some professional and college teams take a different approach, they dont follow the demographics, and they follow the psychographics. The marketing director of the Cub says, You dont control the product. The products are the

players on the field, something that is not consistent, especially for professional baseball. (Niad, 2013) Something that Ive learned in class was that marketers manipulate the 5 Ps to influence individuals sports opportunities; product, price, promotion, public relations, and place. (Graham, 2001) Products obviously reach out to the consumers on a tangible level, promoting the best gear and attire to target audiences knowing what they want. Pricing is a big component when dealing with products because the product must be affordable based on what your target market is. Public relations is the base of marketing, public relations reaches out to the target demographics and finds all of the key needs to that particular audience, for example feel-do-learn this is a concept that sports marketers try to stir emotions before anything else in selling merchandise. (Wieberg, 2009) Place is important as well, you can market all you want but if you dont market at the correct location you end up wasting time and money. While marketing you must think of your target audiences satisfactions, what will get the audience to persevere into purchasing a product or becoming attracted to a particular college brand. Sports marketers found it necessary to increase the product benefits by manipulating product, place and promotions, reduce cost to consumer by directly reducing the price or indirectly reducing the price through promotions, discounts, giveaways, and coupons. Fans as well as game attendees are more than attracted to free things but little do they know these free things are appealing to their wants and needs, its almost like a mind game yet it benefits both parties. The risk of increasing consumer satisfactions is that you may lose revenue, however although you lose revenue it is still an opportunity given to you that will help you possibly make more than enough money to replenish that loss. Marketing First Hand

Experiencing sports marketing first hand and being in the atmosphere that influences the fans you truly see the effect it has on consumers. As apart of my job I handle all of the promotions for the Charlotte 49er athletic teams to promote the Charlotte 49ers we reach out to the crowd during timeouts and halftime shows. People would be surprised as to how influenced people are with free giveaways. We can make close to 2,000 people come to an athletic event just by giving away free t-shirts. Not only do we attract the fans with tangible things such as tshirts and bags but we also advertise our players. Working this job, I have discovered that there is nothing more that these athletes love more than attention. Sometimes the best of sports marketing is promoting through players so we often use the athletes as our advertisement by offering autograph singings and meet the coaches and players opportunities for the community. Some like to call this marketing through sports, which is just using the sport as an incentive for the consumer to come and be part of the experience with the athletes. When dealing with the community we target the children in particular because children are fascinated with looking up to the athletes as role models and are the base to creating a loyal fan base. An example of an event while marketing through the athletes is Basketball Madness. This event is a huge event for the basketball team both men and womens team. This event is open to the public as well as the students of Charlotte. This event alone is to promote the upcoming season and to get the fans excited for basketball coming and to introduce everyone to the players. This is just one of many examples on how to promote through events. You dont only have to promote through players and at the actual athletic events. We also like to bring Norm to schools for the children to take pictures with him and get the Charlotte 49ers name out there on other campuses.

Social networks being such a popular thing these days, this is one of the most important and effective methods of marketing because not only does it reach out to millions who use these social networks but its free marketing. This allows the fans to connect and keep up with their interested teams as well as following the players and coaches pages to get the inside scoop of what is going on during the seasons. Social media also encourages people around the world to share their thoughts, emotions and support for the teams and the players they love. It also creates an opportunity to establish and progress the loyalty level of the fans. Founder and CEO of BigEye Creative said, In todays age, simply registering for a twitter account isnt enough. (Ramb, 2013) By the second people are thinking of new things to improve on and how to be better than one another. Colleges not only use social media to reach out to their fans, some schools have even used it as a tool for football recruiting. Bleacherreport.com claims that Clifton Garrett is one of the nations top prospects in the 2014 recruiting class but hes also a compulsive tweeter, tweeting over 16,000 times since hes joined. Garrett is rated a 5-star linebacker by 247 Sports and is considering schools like LSU, Tennessee, Ole Miss, and Florida and he interacts with his fans by tweeting on college game days and saying things like Rocky Top to Tennessee fans just to get them going because people are itching to see which school he chooses. Lauren Dugan of MediaBistro.com wrote an article about twitter exceeding 500 million users in February of 2012 and is growing fast enough to be rated to the top one billion users by 2014. Social media has even helped inspire the changes to the NCAAs recruiting rules. Many coaches and parents dont understand twitter, Facebook, and vine, it seems as though the athletes dont understand the maturity to use these social networks appropriately. College coaches used to go through the high school coaches to reach the players but now recruiting coaches go straight through social

medias to start the process. In comparison with phone calls or text messages, NCAA rules place fewer restrictions with social media. Talking about how social media and marketing is a great thing; it goes both ways, its not all positive. Sometimes there are fans that dont agree with the way a program is being ran and they come at the coach with nasty words and name calling or even people from other schools come onto other schools social media pages to write mean things. It has some positive and negative opportunities. (Kirpalani, 2013) Creating The Name Branding is often perceived as the actual logo or symbol of an organization or team but in fact it really is the experience of the logo. Branding is what people feel, what people think of when they see and associate with the logo. Branding is very important to universities, positive branding is what they thrive for and need to become successful. (Kotler, 1983) Some may not know but NCAA branding has gained a lot of questions in regards to whether college sports marketing has come to conflict with traditional views of amateur athletics. There are rules for how college athletes are perceived in the media because they should not be considered as professionals. However, seeing the athlete in the media wearing the gear and representing the NCAA and their school is what the people want to see. The fans thrive off of good players especially when they know they are going to get into a professional league some day. (Jessop, 2013) Here at UNC Charlotte branding is a big deal, especially when it comes to the use of the logos. Most universities have an academic logo as well as an athletic logo, typically the university works together to brand these logos together to make sure the public eye is not looking at the school as two separate entities but looked at as one. However, UNC Charlotte does not get along very well when it comes to this. I work both with the athletics department as well as the

universitys student union. Athletics refuses to publicize anything with the UNC Charlotte crown on it and the student union doesnt like the university to be publicized as the athletic logo. The more we get into our improvements of technology and media relations that line between the two becomes thin and they are only treated as athletes and that doesnt seem to sit well with UNC Charlotte which is why they are probably stubborn with their logo being strictly academic. If we look back to the past when UNCC was first established, the founder did not want it to be a University represented solely on the sport, they wanted it to be seen as a scholarly university so as time has passed, rules have evolved and college athletics have changed and the marketing of it all follows. In the future this feud will be a big deal because in a marketing perspective, once the athletic teams become more successful especially with the football program entering this year the school will be getting larger and the two departments will be fighting to gain popularity in the public eye. I hope that one day there can be an agreement on how this school is perceived with the usage of their logos. (Timmons, 2013) Another important thing for marketing is that you want to make sure your brand sticks to a consistent name. For example, athletics wish to be known, as Charlotte 49ers not UNCC, not UNC Charlotte, not Charlotte, or any other name. Charlotte 49ers have been trying to establish their name for years. When making the academic/athletic distinction they want to be sure that the mascot and the schools theme is coming across to the public eye, after all we are the 49er miners. After our name is established everything else falls along with it, then norm the mascot can come in with his pickaxe, which is an important establishment for our school. In the beginning football wasnt something some people were fans of, in fact there were more doubts than excitement about it. However, slowly but surely those who doubted bringing football to UNC Charlotte see the impact it has brought to the students and greater community. Alumni are

proud to say they went to this school and are more active than theyve ever been, students are ecstatic about going here and are proud to wear their Charlotte attire, and even current high school students are excited and crossing their fingers as they turn in their applications that they get accepted and are able to call themselves a forty-niner.

How It Will Continue As you can see with all of these marketing situations it gets difficult to narrow down how to do things, when to do things, and who to do these towards. You try to satisfy as many people as you can and sometimes you are forced to do this with a budget that suffices. Colligate and professional athletics are obviously two completely different worlds. However, when reaching out to fans and speaking on behalf of the marketing world, everyone speaks the same language. All of the different methods to marketing are effective from social media, to giveaways, to events. I could sit here and say which one is the best one or which one is the worst one but it really just depends on who your target market is. All ages love free things whether its a t-shirt or a hat. The social media marketing may only reach out to the audience ages 17-30. These are factors that play a huge role in decision-making and for UNC Charlotte; I believe our biggest outreach should be to families. UNC Charlotte is an up and coming school especially with football, Alumni are proud to have attended this university and they want their families to be proud as well. We need to start building a loyal and young fan base and build straight from the bottom. Loyal fans arent something that comes over night; it is definitely a process that needs to be established for years with consistency. Universities are always trying to discover new methods of marketing to get their university noticed and branded. Little do the fans and supporters know that they control all of how things are marketed, it falls into the old economic

concept of supply and demand. What is the target market demanding right now? What social network is popular right now so that we can reach out to our fans? Sports marketing is not just a market that promotes a brand, its a way of life and it lives through the peoples preferences and will continue to evolve over time. (Carmen, 2013)

Works Cited Funk, D. (2008). Consumer behavior in sports and events. Burlington: Elsevier Linacre House. Graham, S., Neirotti , L., & Goldblatt, J. (2001). Ultimate guide to sports marketing. New York: McGraw-Hill. Jessop, A. (2013, September 26). An in-depth look into keurig's college sports marketing plan. Retrieved from http://www.forbes.com/sites/aliciajessop/2013/09/26/an-in-depth-lookinto-keurigs-college-sports-marketing-plan/ Kirpalani, S. (2013, August 10). How social media has transformed college football recruiting. Retrieved from http://bleacherreport.com/articles/1731067-how-social-media-hastransformed-college-football-recruiting Kotler, P. (1983). Principles of marketing. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice Hall. Niad, M. (2013, May 30). Sports teams look to score by marketing younger fans. Retrieved from http://news.medill.northwestern.edu/chicago/news.aspx?id=222265 Ramb, J. (2013, September 11). [Web log message]. Retrieved from http://bigeyecreative.com/blog/advantage-set-how-sports-marketers-are-taking-socialmedia-interaction-to-the-next-level/ Schaaf, P. (1995). Sports marketing. Amherst: Prometheus Books. Timmons, S. (2013). An observation on Sports Marketing. University of North Carolina at Charlotte. Unpublished. Wieberg , S., & Berkowitz, S. (2009, April 02). Ncaa, colleges pushing the envelope with sports marketing. Retrieved from http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/sports/college/2009-04-01marketing-cover_N.htm