Guest editorial

Citation

Ross, J.A. (2012), "Guest editorial", Journal of Historical Research in Marketing, Vol. 4 No. 4. https://doi.org/10.1108/jhrm.2012.41204daa.001

Guest editorial

Article Type: Guest editorial From: Journal of Historical Research in Marketing, Volume 4, Issue 4

When the term “sports marketing” was coined by Advertising Age in the 1970s, it referred to how sports were being used as a vehicle for promoting other non-sport consumer products. Only later did the idea that the marketing of sport itself, rather than just marketing through sport, should be the focus of academic study (Mullin et al., 2007, p. 8). Indeed, this dual nature is only the beginning of the unique character of sport marketing, which navigates uncertain outcomes and control over the on-field product, engages with a literally fanatical consumer base, negotiates often idiosyncratic relationships with state regulation, forms a symbiosis with broadcast media, and embodies an overall cultural embededness that most industries can only envy (see Beech and Chadwick, 2007, pp. 8-13). And since the character of sports marketing owes much to the historical antecedents of the sports business in general, the way the industry not only markets, organizes, and structures itself make it particularly compelling for academic research (Hardy, 1986; Ross, 2009).

From the 1970s, the study of sport marketing has proliferated, especially in the North American context where the economic status and social influence of sport has grown exponentially in the last decade of the twentieth century and into the twenty-first. A few disciplinary organs have become prominent and given voice to a generation of scholarship and practice that take seriously the study of the special marketing challenges presented by the sport product and its consumer. Three journals are most prominent: the International Journal of Sport Management and Marketing (2005), the International Journal of Sports Marketing & Sponsorship (1999) and the oldest, Sport Marketing Quarterly (1992), which recently celebrated its twentieth anniversary as a forum for sport marketing research. The vast majority of research has a contemporary orientation, and IJSMM and IJSMS have (so far) shown little in the way of historical content. SMQ has had historical articles from its inception, but a retrospective article noted that only eight articles (2.3 per cent) had a historical approach to sport marketing problems. Most prominent is the work of Lori Miller and Larry Fielding, who offered a series of explicitly historical articles in the late 1990s on the sporting goods industry that serve as a model for the value of this approach (Miller et al., 1993; Fielding and Miller, 1996a, 1998). (Fielding and Miller (1996b) also provides a very useful chronology of sport marketing eras.)

Venues in related fields, like the International Journal of Business & Industrial Marketing and the Journal of Services Marketing, have produced special issues on aspects of sport marketing, but the historical perspective is usually given short shrift. For that reason this special issue of the Journal of Historical Research in Marketing gives a much-needed opportunity to examine how marketing helped sports transform from games to consumer products.

There are significant gaps in academic understanding of how sport was marketed in historical contexts. Unlike many disciplines, sport has a popular audience and journalists and practitioners have been quite keen to respond with books about headline-makers. While the topics chosen are mostly on-field and athlete-centred, the seminal roles of sports marketers are increasingly seeing the light of day. The first of the kind were the autobiographical books of Bill Veeck (Veeck and Linn, 1962, 1965), which contain classic stories of his innovative promotions, but more recently he has merited a full biography (Dickson, 2012). In what may be an emerging trend, in the last year we have also seen two books on George L. (“Tex”) Rickard, the father of American sports promotion (Waltzer, 2011; Aycock and Scott, 2012). If this indicates a renewed popular interest, hopefully it will be matched by academic interest for to this date there still has been no serious academic attention to people like Rickard, who set the pattern for arena-based twentieth-century sport marketing.

The field is not empty, but the coverage is sporadic. Baseball entrepreneur Albert Spalding has been viewed for both his domestic importance (Levine, 1985) and his international role in the transmission of American culture through baseball tours (Zeiler, 2006). Individual sports have been subject to innumerable case studies of their marketing practices, but here again deep historical approaches are rare. Michael Oriard’s quartet of books on football – Reading Football (Oriard, 1993), King Football (Oriard, 2001), Brand NFL (Oriard, 2007), and Bowled Over (Oriard, 2009) – are fine analyses of the historical and cultural context of strategies used to market effectively a dominant American sport. Inroads have also been made into bodybuilding (Chapman, 1994), golf (Lowe, 1999), college sports (Marrs, 1998), and prize fighting (Reel, 2001), but there is a lot more room to apply these methods and others that incorporate modern theoretical insights about sports marketing and its evolution.

In pursuing new avenues, historical sport marketing research can take advantage of the seminal work on mass marketing in the late-nineteenth and twentieth century American context that has appeared over the last two decades. This includes Susan Strasser’s ground-breaking Satisfaction Guaranteed: The Making of the American Mass Market (Strasser, 1989, repr. 2004), which details the rise of marketing in the consciousness of American corporations, and examines it through its expressions in branding techniques, market segmentation, product positioning, market research, new distribution relationships, and the general shift from customer to consumer. Work by Tedlow (1990), Leach (1993), Lears (1994), and others provide the context for the major changes of the era, which not coincidentally runs parallel to the “rise of sport”. The question for scholars of sport marketing is: how did sport fit into these processes?

The focus on marketing changes also makes a point about the character of twentieth-century business and the America-led story that historians have told about it. Influenced by the works of Alfred Chandler, historians have seen the twentieth century as the apogee of the “big business” – large, centralized producers for a national mass market. The sports industry provides an alternative model of development, one based on a tension between national and local products, and mass and micro markets. The history of the marketing of sport then serves the purpose of enlightening a post-Chandlerian model of business, one that, as one scholar put it, focused less on standardized mass production, but on flexible creation of “endless novelty” (Scranton, 1997). How did the marketing of small capital sports enterprises compare to the big businesses that dominated the landscape?

So far, the historical approach to sport marketing has been dominated by historians of sport and business, as well as a full range of authors writing for a popular audience keen to learn more about the business of sports more generally. This does not have to be the case. Of course, “doing history” by engaging with archival sources can be daunting as those who are trained in management and business, where existing modes of enquiry can limit the range in inquiry (de Wilde et al., 2010, pp. 406-407). However, history is a catholic discipline where a wide variety of methods are used, and the many strengths of many specialists in business, management and marketing – sport and otherwise – can be turned to real advantage in the study of sport marketing. Quantitative and statistical prowess is especially valuable in those cases when historical databases are available to be constructed, and theoretical sophistication is a boon when applied to new sources. Still, some time must be spent acquiring some of the skills of the historian – an appreciation of evidence, the subtleties of interpretation and the contingent nature of the past being foremost among them.

The rewards of rising to the interdisciplinary challenges are evident in the papers gathered for this special issue. Scholars of marketing, sport, business, media, and archives examine the sport marketing history of a wide range of activities ranging from ancient Rome to the late twentieth century United States, and in doing so illustrate the promise of taking theoretically-informed discussion to the archival material and revealing important processes.

Our first research article will no doubt become a major reference work in the field of sport branding research. In “Toward a history of sport branding,” Stephen Hardy, Brian Norman, and Sarah Sceery join the histories of branding and sport, a relationship that has until now escaped attention of most marketing scholars and sport historians. Providing a much-needed theoretical basis for thinking about the special role of branding in sport, the authors discuss the relevance of brands to entrepreneurship, technology, narrative, and visuality. Recommending new sources and approaches, above all they insist on the importance for scholars to “keep an eye on each other’s work.”

In “Spectator consumption practices at the roman games,” Yuko Minowa and Terrence H. Witkowski take on the challenge of applying modern consumer theory – D.B. Holt’s typology of consumption practices (Holt, 1995) – to the past, in this case the ancient practice of gladiatorial combat. Through an exploration of ancient texts, images and archaeological representations, they find that the games were consumed for a variety of purposes, including group cohesion, community building, socialization and, not least, the experience itself.

Ari de Wilde brings us into the next age of arenas, the Gilded Age of the United States. In “Six day racing entrepreneurs and the emergence of the twentieth century arena sportscape, 1891-1912,” he shows how the arena as consumption space created a new environment for sport. Though nowhere near as popular in the present day, at the turn of the nineteenth century and into the twentieth six-day racing appealed to modernizing sensibilities and attracted thousands of spectators to watch the fast, exciting – and often dangerous – sport. Drawing upon and modifying John MacAloon’s frame theory (MacAloon, 1984), which helps us understand the structure of social experiences, de Wilde highlights the entrepreneurs who organized and promoted the sport while competing as intensely off the track as their racers did in the banked oval.

The recognition that sport, like many products, is multi-dimensional in its appeal is explored in Dylan J. Esson’s study of the creation of a western American ski resort in the 1930s. “‘Winter sports under a summer sun’: The Marketing of Sun Valley Ski Resort in the 1930s” tells the story behind the market research, product design, preparation, and execution of a sport tourism experience aimed at a segmented American leisure market. It is also a story of translation: first, of how a large old-line American firm, the Union Pacific Railroad, tried to use its capital and infrastructure to obtain synergy between destination and transportation; and second, how the promotion genius hired to sell Sun Valley, Steve Hannagan, was able to successfully apply strategies that had already transformed Miami Beach into a tourist mecca.

American sport culture could transform mountain valleys, and it could also compete in foreign marketplaces if given access to a fertile field. Benjamin Litherland argues, in “Selling punches: free markets and professional wrestling in the UK, 1986-1993,” that the successful adoption of satellite television in the UK and the arrival of the American import World Wrestling Federation presented a major challenge to British wrestling structures and media channels. His argument reminds us that the world of sport is part of the late twentieth century globalization processes, and in the United Kingdom the marketing mix was interlaced with technological and regulatory considerations. Litherland’s conclusions also bring up the interesting question of whether all sports are fungible across borders.

We close the issue with Wayne Wilson’s Explorations and Insights piece, “A preview of the Mark H. McCormack collection,” which offers up one of the most promising sources for future sport marketing research. Wilson reminds us that it is the availability of archival resources that influences the topics historians research, and the difficulty of locating relevant primary source material is a real challenge. For many projects, the pending opening of the Mark H. McCormack Collection at the University of Massachusetts will burst open the possibilities. McCormack, often called the father of modern sports marketing, is the late founder of the International Marketing Group (now IMG Worldwide), a leading innovator in the marketing of professional athletes. The 6,000 linear feet of documents (about eight million pages) in his collection contain a wealth of material from the period 1960 to 2000, a mother lode of marketing and sport business history.

All together, these articles put on display the wide range of topics, sources, and methodology available to the history of sport marketing researcher. As co-editors, and on behalf of the contributors, Stephen Hardy and I want to thank JHRM editor Brian Jones for encouraging us to put out the call for scholarship and to challenge ourselves and others to think about the field in new and promising ways.

J. Andrew RossUniversity of Guelph, Ontario, Canada