The

sports industry is defined as the market in which the businesses and products offered to its buyers are sport related and may be goods, services, people, places, or ideas. Sports marketing has become one of the most influential effects of college athletics; some say it is just as important as the actual sport being marketed. Think about it, how do you hear about your favorite team? How do you know where to get your favorite teams gear? How do you know what the logo of the team looks like? Well thats what sports marketing is all about. Appealing to your attractions, youd be surprised at what entails in marketing. You are apart of marketing just as much as IMG, International Management Group a global sports and media business by talking about sports, wearing shirts and jerseys for your favorite college team, posting an update about your favorite team through your facebook, twitter, and instagram. See, marketing is all around you, you just dont realize it because its such an unconscious act. When thinking of marketing strategies you must market to everyone. Take a look at the demographics that attend the events and control your marketing through that. The Chicago Cubs divide their fans into seven segments, upcoming renovations to the ballpark will allow benefits targeted to those loyal and valuable customers, such as different concession options on the club level. More than 60 percent of Cubs fans started following the team before the age of 12. Therefore, the importance of engaging the young, loyal fan base is the most valuable long-term. Some professional and college teams take a different approach, they dont follow the demographics, they follow the psychographics. The marketing director of the Cub says you dont control the product. The product is the players on the field, something that is not
desktop support 10/17/13 10:13 AM Comment [2]: In text citations are required desktop support 10/17/13 10:14 AM Comment [1]: We like how you make these rhetorical questions

consistent, especially for professional baseball. Marketing directors often stumble across on marketing opportunities such as what exactly do you market to? Individual players, the team or the arena? With television and on-demand on the computers its becoming more of an experience, getting people to choose to spend their time and money at a game becomes more of a special occasion. Marketers manipulate the 5 Ps to influence individuals sports opportunities; product, price, promotion, public relations, and place. Products obviously reach out to the consumers on a tangible level, promoting the best gear and attire to target audiences knowing what they want. Pricing is a big component when dealing with products because the product must be affordable based on what your target market is. Public relations is probably the base of marketing, public relations reaches out to the target demographics and finds all of the key needs to that particular audience, for example feel-do-learn this is a concept that sports marketers try to stir emotions before anything else in selling merchandise. Place is important as well, you can market all you want but if you dont market at the correct location you end up wasting time and money. While marketing you must think of your target audiences satisfactions, what will get the audience to persevere into purchasing a product or becoming attracted to a particular college brand. Sports marketers found it necessary to increase the product benefits by manipulating product, place and promotions, reduce cost to consumer by directly reducing the price or indirectly reducing the price through promotions, discounts, give-aways, and coupons. Fans as well as game attendees are more than attracted to free things but little do they know these free things are appealing to their wants and needs, its almost like a mind
desktop support 10/17/13 10:15 AM Comment [3]: Maybe have a little bit longer introduction to introduce all of your points

game yet it benefits both parties. The risk of increasing consumer satisfactions is that you may lose revenue, however although you lose revenue it is still an opportunity given to you that will help you possibly make more than enough money to make up for that loss. Since the beginning of 2007, a total of 37 schools have guaranteed themselves more than a combined $1.7billion by bundling and selling their multimedia rights. However, like stated before the company IMG work to recoup their investment by making as many corporate sponsorship deals as allowed by the other schools. While times are changing, so are sports fans. Trying to get loyalty fans for UNC Charlotte is no longer easy with just a free t-shirt. Experiencing sports marketing first hand and being in the atmosphere that influences the fans you truly see the effect it has on consumers. As apart of my job I handle all of the promotions for the Charlotte 49er athletic teams to promote the Charlotte 49ers we reach out to the crowd during timeouts and halftime shows. People would be surprised as to how influenced people are with free give-aways. Not only do we attract the fans with tangible things but we also advertise with the players. Sometimes the best of sports marketing is promoting through players so we often use the athletes as our advertisement by offering autograph singings and meet the coaches and players opportunities for the community. Some like to call this marketing through sports, which is just using the sport as an incentive for the consumer to come and be part of the experience with the athletes. When dealing with the community we target the children in particular because children wish to be just like the athletes and look up to them.

Every year there is an event called Basketball Madness this event is a huge event for the basketball team both men and womens team. This event is open to the public as well as the students of Charlotte. This event alone is to promote the upcoming season and to get the fans excited for basketball coming and to introduce everyone to the players. This is just one of many examples on how to promote through events. You dont only have to promote through players and at the actual athletic events. We also like to bring Norm to schools for the children to take pictures with him and get the Charlotte 49ers name out there on other campuses. Social networks being a big deal in our world, this is one of the most important methods of marketing because not only does it reach out to millions who use these social networks but its free marketing unless you wish to be on banners on other websites but for the most part schools have their own facebook and twitter pages that students can follow. This allows the fans to connect and keep up with their interested teams as well as following the players and coaches to get the inside scoop of what is going on during the seasons. Social media also encourages people around the world to share their thoughts, emotions and support for the teams and the players they love and creates an opportunity to deepen the loyalty level of the fans. The fans can also interact with one another about the games or daily activities that the team exposes online. In todays age, simply registering for a twitter account isnt enough. By the second people are thinking of new things to improve on and how to be better than one another. Colleges not only use social media to reach out to their fans, some schools have even used it as a tool for football recruiting. Clifton Garrett is one of the nations top prospects in the 2014 recruiting class but hes also

desktop support 10/17/13 10:20 AM Comment [4]: Maybe include basketball fan day as well, its an opportunity to interact with fans, especially children

desktop support 10/17/13 10:21 AM Comment [5]: Do any other sports have things like this or maybe camps? Right now it seems like its all centered around basketball and football

a compulsive tweeter, tweeting over 16,000 times since hes joined twitter. Football coaches talk saying how they remember when they were growing up, teenagers used to keep journals to record their daily activity but now recruits do the same through their Twitter and Facebook accounts. Garrett is rated a 5-star linebacker by 247 Sports and is considering schools like LSU, Tennessee, Ole Miss, and Florida and he interacts with his fans by tweeting on college game days and saying things like Rocky Top to Tennessee fans just to get them going because people are itching to see which school he chooses. According to Lauren Dugan of MediaBistro.com Twitter exceeded 500 million users in February of 2012 and is growing fast enough to be rated to the top one billion users by 2014. Social media has even helped inspire the changes to the NCAAs recruiting rules. Many coaches and parents dont understand the mechanics of social media, while players lack the maturity to understand it. College coaches used to go through the high school coaches to reach the players but now recruiting coaches go straight through social medias to start the process. In comparison with phone calls or text messages, NCAA rules place fewer restrictions with social media. Talking about how social media and marketing is a great thing, it goes both ways, its not all positive feedback. Sometimes there are fans that dont agree with the way a program is being ran and they come at the coach with nasty words and name calling or even people from other schools come onto other schools social media pages to write mean things. It has some positive and negative opportunities. Branding is often perceived as the actual logo or symbol of an organization or
desktop support 10/17/13 10:27 AM Comment [6]: Very cool story about how social media is used but make sure it ties back into marketing. Especially moving into your next paragraph desktop support 10/17/13 10:28 AM Comment [7]: Weird transition, try to make this flow better tying in social media and how social media helps the branding of the university.

team but in fact it really is the experience of the logo. Branding is what people feel,

what people think of when they see the logo. Branding is very important to universities, positive branding is what they thrive for and need to become successful. Some may not know but NCAA Branding has gained a lot of questions in regards to whether college sports marketing has come to conflict with traditional views of amateur athletics. There are rules for how college athletes are perceived in the media and they are not allowed to get paid because they arent considered professionals. However, seeing the athlete in the media wearing the gear and representing the NCAA and their school is what the people want to see. The fans thrive off of good players especially when they know they are going to get into a professional league some day. Here at UNC Charlotte branding is a big deal, especially when it comes to the

use of the logos. Most universities have an academic logo as well as an athletic logo, typically the university works together to brand these logos together to make sure the public eye is not looking at the school as two separate entities but looked at as one. However, UNC Charlotte does not get along very well when it comes to this. I work both with the athletics department as well as the university. Athletics refuses to publicize anything with the UNC Charlotte crown on it and vise versa, the University refuses to publish things that have the UNC Charlotte athletic c-pick on it. No one is really sure about the feud between the two departments and it may not seem like a big deal now but in a marketing perspective, once the athletic teams become more successful especially with football program entering this year the school will be getting larger and the two departments will be fighting to gain

popularity in the public eye. I hope that one day there can be an agreement on how this school is perceived with the usage of their logos. Another important thing for marketing is that you want to make sure your

brand sticks to a consistent name. For example, UNC Charlotte athletics wish to be known as Charlotte 49ers not UNCC, not UNC Charlotte, not Charlotte, or any other name. Charlotte 49ers has been trying to establish their name for years and wish for it to remain this way. When making the academic/athletic distinction they want to be sure that the mascot and the schools theme is coming across to the public eye, after all we are the 49er miners. After our name is established everything else falls along with it, then norm the mascot can come in with his pick axe which is an important establishment for our school. In the beginning football wasnt something some people were fans of, in fact there were more doubts than excitement about it. However, slowly but surely those who doubt bringing football to UNC Charlotte see the impact it has brought to the fans. Alumni are proud to say they went to this school and are more active than theyve ever been, students are ecstatic about going here and to be able to wear Charlotte shirts everyday, and even current high school students are excited and crossing their fingers as they turn in their applications that they were accepted and are able to call themselves students of UNC Charlotte. On the contrary to the NFL, Major League Baseball, and the NBA part of the
desktop support 10/17/13 10:25 AM Comment [8]: We like how you tied in the professionals with college athletics but dont let it take away from your paper and your observations from Assignment One. Did you include your observations?

appeal is that the players are college students, it draws different types of interests for the fans. However, the more we get into our improvements of technology and media relations that line between the two becomes thin and they are only treated as athletes and that doesnt seem to sit well with UNC Charlotte which is why they are

probably stubborn with their logo being strictly academic. If we look back to the past when UNCC was first established, the founder did not want it to be a University represented solely on the sport, they wanted it to be seen as an academic so as time has evolved rules and conventions of college athletics have changed and the marketing of it all follows. As you can see with all of these marketing situations it gets difficult to

narrow down how to do things, when to do things, and who to do these towards. You try to satisfy as many people as you can and sometimes you are forced to do this with a budget that suffices. Colligate and professional athletics are obviously two completely different worlds. However, when reaching out to fans and speaking on behalf of the marketing world everyone speaks the same language. All of the different methods to marketing are effective from social media, to give-aways, to events. I could sit here and say which one is the best one or which one is the worst one but it really just depends on who your target market is. Is it young children, teenagers, adults, older people or families. These are factors that play a huge role in decision making. For UNC Charlotte, I believe our biggest outreach should be to families. UNC Charlotte is an up and coming school especially with the new football program that came in, Alumni are proud to have attended this university and they want their families to be proud as well. We need to start building a loyal and young fan base and build straight from the bottom. Loyal fans arent something that comes over night, it is definitely a process that needs to be established for years with consistency as well. Winning a couple of games couldnt hurt the marketing as well but being a brand new football team, it takes some building up to.
desktop support 10/17/13 10:23 AM Comment [9]: Wrap your conclusion back around to your main point in the intro duction, try to set up your paper like Ashlyns and break them down intro the separate categories in the literary review desktop support 10/17/13 10:21 AM Comment [10]: Dont fotget to include citations