Basketball ahead in battle for global supremacy?

Much has been made of the importance attributed to Asian markets by organisations both in football and in basketball (and, for that matter, in other sports too) - including by this blog. Indeed, whether it's CR9 branded Real Madrid shirts or the NBA and its network of partners in China, the battle lines for global domination in sport are slowly being drawn up, although the nature and rules of engagement are still unclear. Recent news though indicates that the confrontation is about to get a lot more intense with the announcement by the NBA that they are seeking market expansion in Europe: http://www.guardian.co.uk/sport/2009/sep/29/nba-espn-tv-deal How penetrative, and therefore effective, this will be is open to question; while there is a strong predisposition towards basketball in European countries like Lithuania and Greece, others such as the UK and the Netherlands are more strongly oriented towards football. The NBA's international strategy raises some important questions though, most notably for football in its core European markets and the Asian market places which it aspires to control. In particular, how will football respond to the collectivist NBA strategy, whereby a central organisation works on behalf of a group of franchises? How will indivudualistic football clubs respond? By forming strategic alliances with one another? By adopting a much stronger strategic network approach in key markets e.g. by working with local clubs in places like China? Or is there an implication that organisations like UEFA and the EPFL (European Professional Football Leagues) must become more proactive, strategically stronger or adopt a more collectively oriented global strategy? Unless European football clubs adopt a different approach, will any of them have the strategic resources necessary to address the growing commercial threat posed by the NBA?

Gates closing for commercial partners in sport

This summer’s Tour de France was truly historic: the race finished without anyone having returned a positive dope test. Monumental! In a sport seemingly beset with drug problems, professional cycling appeared to have turned the corner, started over, seen the error of its ways, cleaned up its act etc.

Some weeks later however, it was back to “situation normal” when Mikel Astarloza, winner of Stage 16 in this year’s race, tested positive for EPO use. To be honest, the only real surprise about this was that the media singularly failed to refer to the test result as “dope-gate” or some such other gating scandal.

Yet gates elsewhere were swinging this summer like those on a disused farm caught in a tornado. The world of sport witnessed scandals ranging from “crash-gate” to “blood-gate” and beyond (even to situations where women were apparently men – gender-gate?). Crash-gate was the most serious of the summer’s attempts at self-implosion, according to some possibly the most serious sporting scandal of all time.

Indeed, there was a sense amongst certain people that the 2008 F1 Grand Prix in Singapore will serve as a headstone on the grave of sporting credibility: we can no longer trust in or rely upon those involved in sport. Flavio Briatore and Pat Symonds have admitted their guilt and apparently done the decent thing, but others may well be complicit too.

Just how could something so brazen, so dangerous, have remained secret for so long amongst such a small group of people? From whistle-blowing, to organisation culture, the use (and abuse) of power and the basis on which teams compete, the whole saga has been a sad, pitiful, mangled mess of managerial, organisational and commercial issues.

Blood-gate was a lot less controversial than the Renault fiasco, if for no other reason than it was essentially a domestic drama and wasn’t therefore played out in the glare of international publicity. Moreover, while the likelihood of a physically painful outcome was much greater in the F1 case, Harlequins willingness to feign a physically painful outcome was at the heart of bloody matters down at The Stoop.

Anecdotal evidence suggests that the club is not the only one in rugby that maintains a supply of blood capsules, but Harlequins got caught. As with the Renault team, those responsible at Harlequins have either done the decent thing; or else had the decent thing imposed upon them by the relevant authorities. Dean Richards has been the main target of disciplinary interventions because of his prominent role in the affair – strangely, and worryingly, Richards is a former police officer.

While the RFU and the FIA both took a stance in respectively dealing with crashgate and bloodgate, the nature of the interventions was different, and has posed some interesting questions about how scandals in sport should be dealt with. In Renault’s case, the regulatory intervention was much less serious than it was for Harlequins, in part due to the team’s troublesome twins having already fallen on their gilded-swords.

However, Renault suffered more as a result of the commercial consequences than did Harlequins; at a conference late in September, a senior member of the rugby team’s senior management team claimed there had been no problems with sponsors and partners. Renault on the other hand lost its main sponsor (ING) and a secondary one (Mutua Madrilena), both on the same day. The team will undoubtedly have lost money as the result, as well as a considerable measure of commercial lustre.

Essentially, the two cases discussed here have raised an important issue: is sporting scandal dealt with more effectively by regulatory sanctions (as with Harlequins) or by market-led sanctions (as with Renault)?

The latter is controversial, as many people will argue that money got sport into trouble, so can it really be expected to now get it out of the difficulties it faces? Moreover, it relies upon sponsors and partners terminating their contracts with immediate effect, when in fact adjustments and sanctions may move much more slowly as these sponsors and partners only refrain from renewing a contract once it is finished (which might be years in advance).

Yet regulation appears to have a history of failure: despite everyone’s best efforts, doping still takes place, players pop blood capsules in their mouths and cars get deliberately crashed into walls by their drivers.

As such, if money does indeed talk, then perhaps it is pay-back time and the very big carrot that used to hang from a too frequently ineffective stick should be used as the medium through which cheats are dealt with?

Notes on jersey sponsorships in the US

America has started to grapple with the issue of whether or not to allow jersey sponsorships, with sporting commentators expressing a variety of comments such as this from IEG:

http://www.sponsorship.com/About-IEG/Sponsorship-Blogs/Rob-Campbell/September-2009/Analyzing-Jersey-Sponsorships.aspx

The debate in the US is one that many sports in Europe have been through before. Indeed, in some European sports, the issue now is not should a sponsors name and logo be allowed on shirts, rather it is a case of how many? Indeed, in some countries, there are some additional questions being asked: sponsors on the back of shirts? On the shorts? How many on the shorts? On the socks too?

Having completed my doctoral thesis on jersey sponsorships and published work in the area (e.g. Journal of Advertising Research, Journal of General Management, International Journal of Sports Marketing and Sponsorship etc.), there would appear to be a number of questions facing teams, franchises and sponsors in the US including:

• Why is jersey sponsorship needed?
• What do these other sponsorships potentially offer that others don't?
• What value could jersey sponsorships add to teams, franchises and sponsors?
• What is the nature of the link with the bottom-line?
• In what ways would jersey sponsorships add to or cut through mar comms clutter?
• On what basis should sponsorship partners be acquired, retained and then relationships dissolved?
• What might be the cognitive and behavioural responses of consumers to jersey sponsorships?
• What is likely to be the optimal level of activation required to maximise the effectiveness of jersey sponsorships?
• What are the likely to be the ethics and legalities of jersey sponsorships?
  
  
  
  

Fanning emotions

Spent the last few days at, or thinking about, a couple of conferences I attended last week. The first was Sport Marketing 360 on Wednesday; the second was Marketing Week's annual sponsorship conference on Thursdays event. Great cast list across the two events, and plenty of inside information e.g. people at Thursday's event knew in advance that ING was set to make a dramatic announcement. Details of the two events can be found here:

http://www.sportsmarketing360.com/

http://www.centaurconferences.co.uk/brands/marketingweek/events/thesponsorshipsummit/overview.aspx

Across the two days, the majority of sponsors talked about the need to engage with sports fans, and to harness the power of emotion that many of these fans feel for their sports. Indeed, there seemed to be open acknowledgment that sponsors need to work hard to ensure that they are not viewed as cynically exploiting sport, if sponsorship deals are to achieve maxiumum effectiveness. This poses the question therefore: how will sponsorship need to change, especially in the post-downturn world? If one thinks of the emotion that e.g. a football fan feels for their club, how can a sponsor (can a sponsor) replicate this? Harness it? Buy into it? Capture it? What is the most appropriate phraseology? Can it ever work? Won't fans always be cynical of sponsorship exploitation? As Marx might have put it: the appropriation of value (generated by a team, club or sport)? And what might movements such Against Modern Football (http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=9943026245) think about the role that sponsors are playing in 21st century sport? Yet surely sponsors have got a role to play in supporting sport, especially during these difficult times? And if they can help to induce, support and perpetuate the emotions associated with our favourite sports, this must be a good thing - mustn't it? Ultimately, if teams, clubs, sponsors and the fans all win from engaging in a mutually-benefical relationship, this has to be the way foward - hasn't it?

Naughty by numbers

Craig Bellamy and Gary Neville will not face charges of improper conduct following Sunday's highly charged Manchester City/United confrontation, although Emanuel Adebayor still faces an improper conduct charge following his, er, charge down the field to celebrate the goal he scored against his old team Arsenal (again for Manchester City) in front of his ex-employer's fans. In the light of Bellamy and Neville's misdemeanours, Adebayor can therefore sleep peacefully, knowing that he is also unable to face charges. True? Or may be not? Given that most disciplinary cases inevitably seem to be dominated by interpretation, thereby implying the strong influence of a large degree of human judgement, errors and therefore inconsistency are surely the characteristic of such decisions? In other words, Emanuel, don't assume anything just yet. Could it therefore be that sport, in this case football, looks at a more scientific, possibly quantitative approach to arriving at disciplinary decisions? For instance, could approaches such as the Delphi or the Critical Incident Techniques produce more rigorous, more scientific, more balanced, fairer and more justifiable decisions than the current over-reliance on interpretivism?

Celebrate good times, come on?

There is a whole series of issues one could debate around the subject of Manchester City 'hardboys': stamping, thumping and abusing being three - particularly interesting subject material too when one considers that Alex Ferguson and Arsene Wenger and their teams have been the most recipients of the Sky Blue Treatment. One simple observation for older readers of this blog: isn't Hughes the manager exactly the same as Hughes the player was? Hard as nails but rarely lost his cool. Otherwise, there's an interesting issue pertaining to goal celebrations, something I was asked to comment on in a Tweet this afternoon. Should Adebayor and Bellamy have celebrated in the way they should? More specifically, I was asked: should goal celebrations be banned? Are they becoming too provocative and inciting? Could players be linked in some way to health and safey concerns? Could a fan, someone who may have been hurt following such a goal celebration, take legal action against a player who celebrates in a provocative way? Possibly claiming some kind of vicarious liability, or otherwise, on the part of the player? Or is the notion that celebrations might be banned complete lunacy? Surely it is part and parcel of the game? And how would you stop/regulate/monitor/control it? Perhaps there is a middle way? Celebrate, but not too much? How would this work? And can one really imagine a set of procedures or rules for celebrating a goal? May be there would have to be video replays of goal celebrations to decide whether or not a regulation had been breached?

End in sight for social undesirables?

With tobacco sponsorships and advertising long gone, how long can alcohol and online gambling sponsorships last? Within 10 years, will both of these other forms of sponsorship have disappeared? Will any disappearance be the result of domestic legislative change, will the European Union intervene, or could markets dictate a shift as properties move away from an association with products and brands that are generally considered to be of an undesirable nature? Or is the debate about alcoholism sponsorships in particular nothing more than sensationalism? Is there any tangible or proven link between sponsorship, alcohol consumption and, for that matter, bad behaviour? And what about sponsorships involving online gambling companies - any evidence to support a link?