Strategic sport marketing in the society of the spectacle

ABSTRACT

The representation of reality seems to have gained precedence over reality. In the society of the spectacle, entertainment has become the experience. Accordingly, sport organizations must increasingly provide added value to their fans’ brand experience. Nowadays, entertainment and sport have merged to give birth to ‘sportainment’. Through a polar type of case study, this paper examines how the strategic marketing of, and through, sport can adapt to this reality by proposing a strategic sportainment mix. This study demonstrates that the strategic sportainment mix can provide valuable insights about the theoretical fit between strategic marketing efforts by, or through, sport, on the one hand. This is in addition, on the other, to a stakeholder segmentation that categorizes fans according to their connection with sport in a society of the spectacle. The proposed sportainment mix could boost the fan lifetime value, together with both the customer and financial-based brand equity.

KEYWORDS:

• Spectacle
• ‘sportainment’
• gamification
• creative destruction
• strategic marketing
• FC Barcelona

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1. Please, see Remote Cheerer demo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VHkC-iAVr20&feature=emb_logo.

2. This is not to mention the ‘national interest’ exemption that the National Hockey League (NHL) was awarded to allow teams to cross the Canada–USA border during the 2021 playoffs, even though the latter was still closed to the common citizen. In fairness, fans were gradually allowed in arenas in the spring/summer 2021, as vaccination rates started to increase.

3. The ‘Miracle on Ice’ gold medal conquest, accomplished by the American ice hockey team at the 1980 Lake Placid Olympics, comes to mind; not to forget the boycott of the 1980 Moscow Summer Olympiad by most of the Western bloc; this was followed by a boycott of the 1984 Los Angeles Summer Games, this time by a vast majority of the Warsaw Pact members.

4. In Orlando, gaming companies are collaborating with Walt Disney, Universal Studios, sport properties and even Nasa to produce a Layer 3-type of sportainment experience.

5. Such as the 299-page 2016–2017 FC Barcelona annual report, the 8-page 2015–2021 FC Barcelona strategic plan for contextual information, alongside all currently available Barça Foundation annual reports and their 2016–2021 strategic plan (328 pages).

6. Please, see https://www.fcbarcelona.com/en/club/organisation-and-strategic-plan/commissions-and-bodies/strategic-plan-2015-21.

7. Please, visit https://foundation.fcbarcelona.com/home.

8. Please, refer to the Thom Browne’s official site: https://www.thombrowne.com/ca/.