Exploring the degree of commercialisation associated with sports marketing activities

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to provide practitioners of management and interested researchers insights to the degree of commercialisation in sports and how advertisement has evolved to become a major force in the sports entertainment field though corporate sponsorship and commercialised of athletes. With commercialisation, it gears towards owners, corporate sponsors, and advertisers which play a huge impact on the teams. Three major sporting events are focused upon to see how commercialisation takes a tool on the events. The Super Bowl, Major League Baseball World Series and the NCAA Basketball Tournament are now commercialised more over the few years with the advertiser’s ability to target their markets by strategically commercialising the event with advertisements and sponsorships. It was found from an empirical study, females were generally more concerned than their male counterparts that such commercialisation activities do significantly increase the amount of time to finish the game and that such commercialism has negatively impacted athletes’ love of the sport in negative ways. Females were statistically more concerned with the increased degree of violence and unsafe behaviours that are depicted in the sporting event commercials. The degree of corporate sponsorships of physical sport facilities seems to be a neutral issue.