Sport has always served as a bond uniting people of different generations, genders, and even races. Any country can be characterized by high rates of involvement into sports, and Australia is not an exception. Though general rates of Australian population’s participation in sports and physical activities have slightly decreased over the past decade, they still remain quite high with 64% of population being involved into some kind of sport (Australian Institute of Health and Welfare, 2012). Soccer was and still remains one of the most popular kinds of sports in Australia. However, in comparison with other countries where soccer is played, it is the least popular in Australia (Egginton, 2005). One of the reasons explaining this is ineffective marketing of this kind of sport. It can be stated that marketing of Australian soccer has been unsuccessful over the past several years because of insufficient TV coverage, lack of proper fan support, and poor sponsorship that is simply vital for soccer market. This paper is going to analyze these main reasons of unsuccessful marketing of Australian soccer.
Choosing the Framework
To begin with, we are going to look at two major frameworks – the Shani (1997) framework for relationship marketing implementation in sports and the Analytical framework. The primary goal of the Shani (1997) framework is to include relationship marketing into the traditional conceptual framework and to show how it relates to sport. The stress is laid on building strong relationships with customers (spectators, fan, etc.) and developing a company by means of increasing customers’ loyalty. It is a new approach to sport and, without a doubt, it has its strengths and benefits. If people start attending matches or watching them on TV or via the Internet, a definite kind of sport can gain more popularity.
Analytical framework, in its turn, regards sport as multisided market. Similarly to the Shani (1997) framework, analytical framework also emphasizes the importance of customers’ loyalty to their sport and club. However, this framework also takes into account such issues as pricing, branding, promotion, etc. (Houlihan, Auld, Nicholson, & Hoye, 2012). This framework is good, because it shows how diverse the sports market is and how its different components should be treated not only to build the loyalty to a particular club, but also to make sport available and attractive to various audiences, to develop special marketing tools, etc. However, the disadvantage of this approach is its extreme wideness. It aims to deal with everything at once leaving out a number of important minor details at this. Quite logically, the best solution for us will be to combine these two frameworks or, to be more precise, the best elements of each of them. Thus, we are going to borrow the focus on the club’s relationship with its audience from the Shani (1997) model. Analytical framework, in its turn, will give us the understanding of rich nature of the soccer market and all the numerous tasks we have to complete before the marketing of Australian soccer improves.
Now that …