International sport marketing : practical and future research implications

Purpose – Sport is a global product and service that many people around the world enjoy playing, watching and participating in. Whilst there has been an abundance of global media attention on sporting events such as the Olympics and World Football Cup, there seems to be a lack of integration between the sports marketing and international business disciplines both from a practical and also academic standpoint. This paper aims to discuss international sport marketing and why it is an important attribute of business-to-business marketing.

Design/methodology/approach – The aim of the paper is to provide practical implications and research avenues for those seeking to further investigate international sport marketing as a unique area of academic research. The introduction to the paper focuses on the importance of sport to the global economy and how entrepreneurship is ingrained in many sport businesses and organizations. Next, different areas of international business management that relate to entrepreneurial sport marketing ventures are discussed in terms of future research directions and practical implications. These include how entrepreneurial sport ventures affect internationalization, branding, corporate social responsibility, tourism, regional development, marketing and action sports.

Findings – The paper concludes by finding that there are numerous research avenues for future research on international sport marketing that combine different areas of marketing together with the sport marketing and international business literature. In addition, there is enormous potential for linking the sports marketing and international business literature through focusing on entrepreneurial sport ventures that occur worldwide.

Research limitations/implications – The authors demonstrate the need to take an international perspective of sports marketing and business-to-business relationships.

Practical implications – The paper discusses how and why sport firms interact in the international marketplace and how future competition will benefit from more sport-based business-to-business partnerships.

Originality/value – The paper examines the important area of international sports marketing and how businesses that are both profit and non-profit orientated collaborate. The paper explores the concept of international sports marketing, and discusses the practical and future research implications of this exciting new field of marketing research.

Good boards are strategic : what does that mean for sport governance?

To learn more about the governance of sport organizations, this study explored what meaning board members of national sport organizations (NSOs) attach to the concept of "strategic capability". In so doing, the inquiry also identified factors considered to constrain or enable board strategic function. This paper draws on a body of knowledge developed over 38 years on board strategic function, primarily from the commercial setting but also from the emerging body of work in the nonprofit and sport governance setting. Located within the interpretive research paradigm this study engaged a range of different qualitative methods including cognitive mapping and visual imagery. Working across two NSOs in New Zealand, four elements were generated that served as reference points in mapping out the meaning of a strategically able board. These were categorized as the need to have capable people, a frame of reference, facilitative board processes, and facilitative regional relationships.

Competition : the heart and soul of sport management

Understanding competition is central to the task of strategy formulation and implementation and it is the link between competition and strategy that was explored in the 2011 Dr. Earle F. Zeigler Lecture. It was argued that strategy, given its centrality to organizational phenomena, and strategy research in particular, provides rich and diverse competitive contexts with the potential to reveal some of the unique properties of sport management. To ascertain the prevalence of sport-related strategy research, three sport management journals were subject to content analysis to identify published manuscripts related to strategy. Before presenting the results, the Lecture considered competition on and off the field, the origins of competitive behavior in sport management and a brief review of the major research themes in the generic strategic management literature. Results revealed that 20 (2.5%) of the 805 manuscripts published in the three journals were strategy focused. Research themes and contexts were presented as well as a bibliometric analysis of the reference lists of the 20 identified strategy manuscripts. This analysis highlighted the journals that are influencing published sport management strategy-related research. It was concluded that strategy research specific to sport management has been sparse to date, yet the role of strategy formulation is central to the role of management and should also be central to sport management scholarship.