Call for papers: "Sports Marketing Agenda Revisited"

For a special issue of the International Journal of Sport Management and Marketing.

The sports business industry is increasingly growing at a faster pace than global GDP generating revenues of approximately $700 billion yearly (Collignon & Sultan, 2014).

Sports marketing is the decisive business operation which not only brings together but also address a variety of complex issues regarding all major stakeholders, as individual actors as well as components of relationships, that comprise the sports ecosystem namely the:

• leagues that want to secure their fan bases, the popularity of their sport and their sponsorships in order to protect their revenues and their respective distribution to the clubs
• sports clubs, whose primary consideration is increasing ticketing, merchandising and sponsorships
• sponsors who link their names to sports products expecting to leverage their investments,
• media outlets that crave for advertising, high viewership/ traffic and subscriptions on the basis of their sports products in order to secure their viability and ability to pay TV rights to leagues and teams
• players, whose salaries are dependent on the respective sports market but also have a standalone value as endorsers and celebrity brands
• sporting goods and sports services i.e. health and wellness clubs that crave for customers in a highly competitive market and ultimately
• fans whose behaviour needs to be investigated in order for marketers to be able to segment, target and successfully position their sports offerings to them.

This special issue will focus on the advances in shaping the sports marketing agenda towards the seamless integration of actors and actions. We envisage the papers to provide insights regarding contemporary issues in sports marketing and to offer fresh perspectives. Quantitative (including experimental design), qualitative (including netnographies), mixed-method and conceptual approaches are all encouraged. Submission of inter- and cross-disciplinary papers is particularly welcome.

The issue will carry revised and substantially extended versions of selected papers presented at the 5th International Conference on Contemporary Marketing Issues 2017, but we also strongly encourage researchers unable to participate in the conference to submit articles for this call.

Suitable topics include, but are not limited to:

• Antecedents and consequences of consumer behaviour towards sport offerings
• Consumer based brand equity of athletes and teams
• Marketing strategy of the actors, co-opetition and competiveness
• Market and marketing research
• Marketing communication strategies and tactics
• The relationship marketing approach to team and sport affiliation
• Scale development and validation or meta-analyses of existing scales
• The business agenda of social identification through sports (e.g. economic, financial and market consequences of phenomena like sport and team identification, rivalry, stereotyping etc.)
• Mega-events and their effects on tourism and destination branding
• Sport, team, athlete and event marketing in the web 2.0 era
• On and offline sport brand communities
• Sports celebrities as brands
• The dark side of sport marketing (e.g. promoting hooliganism, tribalism, fan misbehaviour, marketing to vulnerable consumers)
• Co-branding, sponsorship and endorsement revisited

Important Dates
Manuscripts due by: 31 March, 2018

References
Collignon, H., & Sultan, N. (2014). Winning in the Business of Sports, The Business of Sports: A.T.Kearney.