Chapter 13
Resource Availability
A sports property that is looking to sell naming rights to its venue, title sponsorship of an event, or other parts of its sponsorship inventory may benefit form enlisting the services of a sponsorship consultancy that has extensive contacts with managers whose companies engage in sponsorship.
Service Quality and Customer Satisfaction
A team or individual athlete's performance in terms of wins, exciting play, and effort/intensity displayed can shape a fan's perceptions about quality of the sports product.
Resource Availability
Also, an agency can possess resources in the form of its network of contacts with other businesses and decision makers. This form of resource availability is particularly relevant for sponsorship sales.
Objectivity
An in-house marketing staff for a minor league hockey team may insist on having a new theme or slogan for a branding campaign each season and may engage in this practice because "that's always how we have done it."
Resource Availability
An outside agency may have resources the sports property does not. Hiring an agency or consultancy can bring an infusion of creativity and human resources.
Resource Availability
An outside perspective can contribute new ideas or alternative approaches to marketing operations of a sports property.
Resource Availability
Approaching potential sponsors without the common ground that networking establishes would make going it alone more challenging for a sports property.
Why Outsource?
Consideration of hiring an outside firm to execute one or more tasks of the marketing function may be difficult for some managers.
Managing Quality
Consumers experience great marketing when their interactions with a seller add value to the consumption choice.
Managing Quality
Delivery of brand promises can be proactively managed so hat moments of truth strengthen customer relationships.
Cost Effectiveness
Even among college basketball programs with larger marketing staffs, employees may have too many other duties and priorities that hinder devoting time to working on an ad campaign.
Why Outsource?
Firms that have multiple needs to execute their sports marketing strategy may want to enlist the services of a full-service agency.
Cost Effectiveness
Hiring an advertising agency to develop the campaign would likely result in lower total cost than adding employees or having an in-house advertising department.
Objectivity
If an outside firm was hired by the team to develop a new brand strategy, its recommendation might be to focus on building a long-term identity for the team's brand.
Defining Service Quality
In order to manage quality in the delivery of sports entertainment experiences, one must be familiar with what quality is from the consumer's viewpoint.
Service Quality and Customer Satisfaction
In the context of marketing sporing events, service quality and price evaluations can be managed by marketers, but assessment of total quality could include outcomes beyond the control of marketers.
Managing Quality
Individual consumers assign varying levels of importance on different aspects of their experience with a brand.
Resource Availability
Interactive sports marketing agency rEvolution developed a research panel of Latino consumers to enable its clients to better understand sports consumption of Hispanic population.
Managing Service Quality
Internal marketing is a management practice founded in the services sector.
Managing Service Quality
It is understood that a high-quality service environment offers potential payoffs in the form of satisfied customers, but what is not as clear is how the create a climate within an organization that focuses on customers.
Objectivity
Its long-term success depends or delivering results to clients that advance their business, not saying nor doing to be influenced by a sports might want.
Managing Service Quality
Its relevance to services is significant given the importance of the employee customer interaction during service delivery on customer judgments of satisfaction.
Managing Service Quality
Leadership is vital to internal marketing success. Commitment must come from the highest levels in an organization. Internal marketing cannot be treated as the latest marketing fad or "program of the month."
Marketing Execution
Living the brand promise not only requires strategy and plans for activation, but it also depends on clearly roles and responsibilities among personnel to transform ideas into actions.
Managing Service Quality
Management must be advocates of internal marketing because part of their role is to encourage employees and provide praise to them when great customer service is observed.
Why Outsource?
Many agencies offer expertise in a particular niche or category. One way that marketing agencies develop expertise in a category is to focus on specific markets or customers.
Marketing Execution
Many functions of a sports property's operations can be outsourced and are discussed in the following section.
Resource Availability
NASCAR gleaned insights such as Hispanics tended to be as brand loyal as other NASCAR fans and that building community should be a focus to encourage Hispanics to watch races with friends and family.
Objectivity
Of course, such reasoning does not necessarily lead to making the best decisions.
Defining Service Quality
One of the most influential research studies on service quality defined quality as a comparison of consumers' expectations of what a marketer should deliver with actual performance.
Objectivity
Outside agencies offer an unbiased perspective on a client's business. An outside agency is independent, not owned or controlled by its clients.
Cost Effectiveness
Reasons for outsourcing marketing functions identified so far share the benefit of improving marketing effectiveness. An alternative reason for outsourcing is that in some cases it costs less to hire someone to do a job than to do it yourself.
Service Quality and Customer Satisfaction
Satisfaction judgments for beyond evaluations of service quality to include a consumer's feelings about quality and the price paid for the service.
Marketing Execution
Sports organizations face the same decision that firms in other industries encounter.
Objectivity
Such a departure from the way things are always done is sometimes difficult to do, even when necessary, if the objectivity of an organization's decision makers is clouded.
Resource Availability
Such added value might never be realized if the creative capabilities of an outside firm were not tapped for help.
Managing Service Quality
The foundation of internal marketing is a belief that in order to effectively serve the external market the needs of the internal market must be met.
Defining Service Quality
The intangible nature of services and consumer involvement in their delivery makes service quality in the service sector more subjective.
Managing Quality
The notion that encounters between a person and brand are aptly described as moments of truth suggests that for the consumer great marketing is not about planning or strategy.
Defining Service Quality
Thus, this customer-based view of quality is a perceived quality that resides in the consumer's mind.
Managing Service Quality
Training is component that must be implemented due to the fact that employee mindset and behaviors needed to foster a customer orientation often require adaptation or change from usual customer service policies.
Managing Service Quality
Training requires a commitment of time and money from the sports property to educate employees.
Cost Effectiveness
When a one-time need arises, it can be more cost effective to hire an outside firm to complete a task or project than to have a in-house staff do it. Consider a college basketball team's need to create an integrated advertising campaign for television, radio, and newspaper.
Objectivity
When an agency works for a client, it is not going to be influenced by a sports property's organizational culture as if the work was being performed in-house.
Managing Quality
Whether consumers place a premium on fast service, courtesy shown by service employees, cleanliness of the physical environment, or some other aspect of the consumption experience, quality of the customer experience is largely within the control of the sports property.
Managing Service Quality
innovation also is need in order to support the needed changes in service processes and employee actions that make up a service orientation.