Marketing and Media
International Sports Events and the National Image at Home and Abroad: The Case of China
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Chenxi Huang
China usually regards hosting international sports events as a great opportunity to win glory for the country and enhance its national image. The whole country would feel extremely proud either for winning medals by its athletes or for hosting such events. Thus heavy investment in such events becomes a matter of high priority to the national and local governments. Whether these efforts are effective at improving the country’s image have seldom been their consideration. However, heavy investment in international sports events does not always bring positive effects to the country’s image. On contrary, doing so often attracts the foreign media’s attention to the negative aspects of China’s image, rather than to the achievements of Chinese athletes. These negative aspects include China’s state sponsored sports system, environmental pollution, the political system and human rights issues. This not only offsets China’s efforts to improve China’s international image but also makes it very difficult to reverse those negative views. This study focuses on divergent perceptions of China’s national image building through major international sports events. It argues that China has yet to find more effective ways to realize this goal with international audiences, to improve its system of managing international sports events, to reduce waster of resources wasting and to build an image of a powerful sports country that is peacefully rising.
A New Moneyball: Economies of Gender in Baseball
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Madi Sieger
Feminist scholar Marilyn Waring’s analysis of the political economy of labour revealed women are excluded by economists, and therefore, policies and policy-makers, and this theory might intersect with the sports media industry. This paper will focus on female baseball fans as a gendered-entity in sports media’s ‘economy of visibility’ (Banet-Weiser, 2015 via Cooky, 2018), and will be investigated through the following research question: If Waring’s findings highlight the economic ways women are undervalued in society, how might female baseball fans experience similar realities-- being exploited as consumers, ignored as participants, and denied opportunities as leaders? This research aims to assess female baseball fans as an audience-- including women working in sports media-- to measure their attitudes and motivations (re: attendance issues across Major League Baseball). This paper may also include segments from a web series focused on the stories of women in baseball, being produced concurrently with this research paper.
Smash that "Like" button, #FitFam: A Phenomenological Study on the Process of Social Media Fitness Entrepreneurs
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Dominic Morais, Florian Hemme
Entrepreneurs are increasingly utilizing social media to launch, promote, and grow their businesses (Fischer & Reuber, 2014). Prominent among social media personae are "influencers" who have carved out a sport and fitness social media entrepreneurship niche. Yet, with little empirical academic research on sport-based digital entrepreneurship, insights into these forms of self-employment remain scarce (Gustafsson & Khan, 2017). To address this gap, using a phenomenological framework, we explored digital fitness entrepreneurs’ experiences navigating the industry through 21 interviews with individuals (11 women, 13 men) positioned in different areas of "fitness." We inducted a general “accidental” pattern in terms of entrepreneurial process, with the underlying goal of maintaining their online social capital, lest they be "unfollowed." Findings included a general “leaning into” entrepreneurial pursuits with a focus on brand distinction through a combination of content conveying the relatability of the entrepreneur, and aesthetically pleasing, often sexualized content. Variations in strategy involving online platform use, content creation, client funneling, and follower engagement were also evident, as well as an overarching anxiety related to the gap between online and offline personas. Although not affiliated with traditional sport organizations, these “everyday entrepreneurs” contribute to a larger area of the sport/fitness industry since Rehman and Frisby studied them as fitness consultants (2000). In a post-modern world with online capabilities, study of these individuals is increasingly important as sport entrepreneurship research continues to grow as an academic field (Hayduk & Walker, 2018; Hemme, Morais, Bowers, & Todd, 2016; Ratten, 2018; Thorpe & Dumont, 2018).
Egg or Chicken Paradox, Which Came First? : College Sports Webcast of Enterprise Volleyball League Games and the Development of Sports Fans
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Anthony SC ShihChieh Huang, Josephine Tc Nio
This is an exploratory case study of how National Taiwan University of Sport’s Webcast in the development of loyal baseball fans. The Department of Sport, Information & Communication at NTUS trained students and provided students with sports webcast hands-on experiences, the team began in 2010, with only twenty sports fans. However, after five years of sports broadcasting training, the team evolved to be a mature webcast team, attracting more than 20,000 audiences watching the championship online. The increasing number of sports fans and buzz online, taught the attention of professional sports channel; in 2018, Fox Sports Channel, took over the live broadcasting, with a greater interest in advertisements revenue. The case study overviewed the formation of NTUS’s Sports Webcast Team and the social media sports marketing efforts in the development of sports fans. Unlike baseball and basketball, the development of volleyball sports fans in Taiwan faced challenges, and at the university had no budget in sports marketing and fans development. With social media marketing and the constant exposure of the sports webcast promotion, we attracted many “Likes & Share” created a buzz among sports fans.
