Sports and Entertainment Marketing 1B: Promoting the Main Event
Sports and Entertainment Marketer Career Pathway Course Units
Unit 1: The Global Market
The world of Sports and Entertainment Marketing is a thriving and exciting field, one wherein the sports sector and the entertainment sector are combined together to form an ever-changing product that’s in very high demand—and that demand is only growing! The increasing demand for this specialized product all comes down to one thing: marketing. In this course, we will delve deeper into the marketing magic that professionals use for sports and entertainment products. By utilizing various marketing resources and combining them with a big picture of the organization, professionals can develop rich and robust marketing plans. This course will teach you how these same professionals create and implement effective marketing strategies that work to promote powerful sports and entertainment brands.
Unit 2: Brand Marketing
The essence of successful marketing is knowing what your customers want and need, and then developing strategies that encourage their loyalty to your company and product. That might sound simple enough, but the fact that approximately half of all new businesses fail within the first five years paints quite a different picture. The challenge, it turns out, is in clearly determining those wants and needs and understanding how they can best be met. In this unit, we will focus on how to do just that. We’ll discuss how successful businesses work to build a personality, or an idea of what is possible, around the product to meet that challenge. By learning to identify the customer, understand their wants and needs, and then meet those wants and needs, a company can beat the odds to become a success story and not just another statistic.
Unit 3: Professionalism in the Workplace
Working in the sports and entertainment industry can be a fun and exciting career. A job that includes watching live sporting events, attending concerts, and getting caught up in the hype of an array of marketing activities makes the sports and entertainment industry easily a top vote for many types of vocations. With so much fun and excitement involved, it’s easy to forget, especially from the fan’s perspective, that this is still a business—one that requires a professional approach. To be a successful professional in this industry, you must be able to communicate, solve problems, and make important decisions that keep the fans happy, the talent performing, and the revenue rolling in.
Unit 4: Sales & the Customer
One of the best blueprints for sketching the nuts and bolts of the sales process in the sports and entertainment industry is the vending of tickets to a vast market eager to attend games, concerts, and sporting events. The target market for ticket sales in this industry is enormous, and salespeople working in this scene must work to understand the consumers and their particular buying habits in order to operate successfully in this competitive field. This unit will focus on the importance of relationship marketing, and along the way we’ll explore the impact that ticket sales has on the industry’s overall revenue. Finally, we’ll wrap up with ways that the savvy salesperson can customize both the product and the experience when dealing with different personalities to close the sale and keep customers coming back for more.
Unit 5: Distributing Sports & Entertainment Products
Sports and entertainment can both be delivered to the consumer in a variety of formats. One consumer might walk into a retail store to buy their favorite team’s jersey. Another person might be looking for a different workout experience, so they opt to purchase home equipment and sign up for online fitness programs. A group of friends might all pitch in to livestream a concert on a Saturday night, or a family might attend an afternoon baseball game together. Each of these scenarios is different, but they all require the guarantee that the product will be available for the consumer when and where they want it. This unit examines the many-sided steps and processes that take place behind the scenes to ensure that the consumer has access to the products they want—and when they want them.
Unit 6: Market Research
Do you have a favorite brand of shoe? People tend to stick with a particular brand of shoe for years, decades, or even all their lives. But what makes someone decide to buy one brand of shoe, like Nike, instead of another brand, like Puma? Or are you someone who prefers another brand of shoe altogether—perhaps Adidas? Most people choose a product brand based on recommendations from friends or from feedback about the product from other users. In other words, they’ve done some kind of research and made an informed decision. It turns out that business organizations also operate in much the same way when deciding how best to spend their resources to attract potential and returning customers. They conduct research, use the data to develop a marketing strategy, and then spend their dollars on what they expect to be sound business decisions. That is the meaning of market research. In this unit, we will see how this process works and take a closer look at its role in sports and entertainment.
Unit 7: The Fine Print: Legalities & Ethics
Understanding how the law impacts your work can be the difference between becoming a story of business success and the risk of realizing far too late that ignorance of the law is no excuse for neglecting its regulatory reach. Well, why not just pay lawyers to handle all your business affairs? That seems the easiest way to go, right? Unfortunately, it’s not that simple. Organizations whose leaders and employees fail to understand the contractual law as it applies to their business dealings risk costly lawsuits that can destroy an otherwise thriving company. In this unit, we will explore some legal and ethical requirements that everyone operating in the workforce should know, and then we’ll focus more closely on those requirements that pertain to the sports and entertainment industry in particular.
Unit 8: The Marketing Plan
Experience shows us that marketing can make all the difference between business success and business stagnation—or, even worse, business failure. A sound marketing plan is the key to better brand awareness, rising revenue, and improved profits for any organization that can execute that plan effectively. But to execute a marketing plan effectively, every team member participating in the plan must embrace the overall strategy that supports the plan while being able to embody a commitment to the standards of the plan that are set and maintained by the marketing professionals. If a company can combine the strands of character, commitment, and consistency, then that can only spell success for any sound marketing plan. This final unit will unite the key concepts covered throughout this course by using them to inform the research methods and invest in the strategic processes that signal the merits of a sound marketing plan. But moving beyond merely producing a sound marketing plan, the unit will also present ways to implement the marketing plan and provide methods for the important process of evaluating the plan and incorporating potential revisions to the plan whenever necessary. And in the final lesson, you will have the opportunity to create a comprehensive marketing plan for your own product or service that’s designed for business success—all by simply following the advice of marketing experts!