Sport marketing in the modern age: a case study of Etihad Airways’ sponsorship of Manchester City Football Club

Abstract

Overview Today almost everyone is exposed (albeit to varying degrees) to the activities of the sport industry, regardless of where they live in the world. Sport is watched on television, read about in the print media, listened to on the radio, viewed on the Internet and discussed amongst friends and family. People attend events, buy merchandise, play sports computer games, and are made aware of a wide range of promotional and marketing campaigns using sport or sports stars to sell goods (Mullin, Hardy, and Sutton, 2007; Graham et al., 2001; Shank, 1999). The Middle East markets, on an individual or collective basis, represent a unique challenge to those involved in the study and practice of sport marketing. The authors have been involved as marketing professionals across the region for almost three decades and bring their experiences to bear throughout this chapter. At present sport is benefiting from very significant investment in the region, especially in the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC). While the FIFA World Cup project in Qatar must be regarded as the regionalflagship in terms of sport marketing potential, equally, both of the United Arab Emirate’s (UAE’s) major airlines, Emirates and Etihad, have recently begun to increase their market profile by using sport as a key marketing tool. In light of this evolution, and indeed the broader growth of sport marketing across the Middle East, an appreciation of professional sport marketing strategies designed to ensure a return on objectives (ROO) and/or a return on investment (ROI) for the stakeholders involved is required. According to Shank (1999), as the sport industry has flourished it has triggered the creation of more vocationally relevant jobs, and nowadays more students are becoming interested in careers in the sport industry than ever before. On a global scale, the role of Mark McCormack and his IMG sports and media group has been an important catalyst for such changes as are being witnessed in recent times, and indeed in the adoption of marketing by and through sport on the part of those who previously may not have considered this medium relevant to their prospective target markets. Founded in 1960, IMG enjoyed early success with both golf and tennis and today it has 3,000 employees working in 30 markets involved in providing a range of services including talent representation, media rights, sponsorship and consultancy to leading sports federations, leagues and competitions, and of course individual sports professionals. In stark contrast to what is broadly accepted to be sport marketing in its most refined form, Saudi Arabia, a key market in the Middle East, only recently witnessed the formation of the country’s first sport marketing agency. Since then, Sela Sport, a Jeddah-based company, has generated over 1.6 billion Saudi Riyals in new revenue for Saudi sport. However, many of the budgets associated with sport are still managed by traditional adverting agencies rather than by the specialised sport marketing providers, such as IMG, and thus the niche field of sport marketing has, for the most part, remained just that. Murray and O’Driscoll (1999) confirm that the relationship between the theory and practice of marketing is an ongoing and evolving field. They suggest that the creation of knowledge capital in the marketplace arises following the integration of the practitioner and the researcher. This integration is one of the unique features of the Institute for Sport Research (ISR) in the UAE, founded in December 2010 as a result of collaboration between the Automobile and Touring Club of the UAE (ATCUAE) and the University of Ulster, UK. The ISR intends to help develop new knowledge in the area of sport management in the Middle East via research, knowledge transfer and education programmes and recently spawned a further dimension to its work through the creation of the Motorsport Knowledge Institute (MKI), which focuses specifically on work in the field of motorsport.