Strategic Sport Communication

Traditional and Transmedia Strategies for a Global Sports Market

W. Timothy Coombs, Jennifer L. Harker

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000437379
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Negocios y empresa
• Subtopic: Relaciones públicas

Authors Coombs and Harker provide step-by-step guidance on how the strategic communication process—an integration of marketing communication, public relations, and advertising—can be applied to sports communication for individual athletes, teams, and leagues.

The book is founded on the premise that the strategic communication process in sport communication is grounded in understanding the fans and sources of revenue. Looking at sports globally, it offers readers the traditional multi-step, linear approach to strategic communication message development along with the transmedia narrative transportation method, a non-linear approach that centers on narratives to engage target audiences and urge them to contribute their own material to messaging. With case studies and practical examples, it also highlights additional issues such as race and gender, social media, ethics, and athlete health.

It is an ideal text for undergraduate and graduate courses in public relations or strategic communication and sport communication.

An online instructor's manual accompanies the text, including lecture slides; a sample strategic sports communication plan; a test bank; links to key web sites that discuss sports and sports communication concerns; links to case studies with class discussion prompts; sample assignments; a sample course syllabus; and suggestions for further reading. Please visit www.routledge.com/9780367898724.

1Sport Communication, Strategic Communication, and Strategic Sport Communication

Defining Our Terms

You are about to learn more about strategic sport communication. The first step is to understand what the phrase strategic sport communication means. The phrase is a combination of very significant approaches to communication, sport communication and strategic communication. Moreover, these two areas of communication are very broad so it is helpful to begin the book by explaining sport communication, strategic communication, and the unique approach you get when melding the two into strategic sport communication.

Key Aspects of Sport Communication

Communicating about sport comes as naturally to some as talking about the weather. Sport offers us a way to connect to others. Moreover, sport communication represents a distinctive form of communication. Sport connects us to community, sport is entertainment, and sport even offers us a platform for social justice and helps our communities—through the entertainment of sport—to work toward cultural equalities. As professional communicators, sport is presented through myriad scholarly techniques. From critical cultural perspectives to sports media, sport is communicated globally in infinite ways. It is important to appreciate the complexity that is sport communication if you hope to engage in sport communication for a living.

Sport and Community

Sport is community. From pick-up soccer games at community fields to the grand stage of the Olympics, sport is rooted in community. Community is defined by Webster’s Dictionary as “a feeling of fellowship with others.” Sport connects people in countless ways. This book will present a number of facets regarding sport that should be considered when strategically communicating about sport, a sports entity or when communicating for a sports organization. But the only thing to keep in mind throughout your upcoming journey of creating a strategic sport communication campaign is the fact that any sport communication scholar will tell you: in sport, communication norms are just incredibly different from virtually any other type or topic of communication. By the time you finish working through this textbook, you will come to understand why we assert such a claim.

Whether a sports fan or not, we regularly interact with one another through sport. Interactivity with one another through community and sport includes watching sports together, talking about sports together, playing sports together, attending sporting events together, and even cheering for a favorite team together. Interactivity through communication regarding sport is unique because sport can offer a universal, low-stakes opportunity to conversationally engage with others. For example, if a stranger on public transportation is wearing a hat with a team logo, it is easy to strike up conversation with that person about a recent game in which that team competed. Furthermore, when discussing sport, that same stranger-engaged conversation can even include a jab at that person’s favorite team, especially if your favorite team is a rival of their favorite team. This type of discordant communication would not typically be extended to a stranger in good faith but, as we say: in sport, communication norms are different. Rivalry is actually a form of social support in sport communication (Harker, 2018). Typically, discordant communication is the antithesis to social support. Perhaps it is the nature of sports fans and their array of fan behavior, which we discuss in detail in Chapter 3, that sets this type of discord apart. Whatever it is, one might argue that discord is all part of the entertainment aspect of sport.

Sport as Entertainment

Sport is big business, as you will read in Chapter 2, but sport is also intertwined with every aspect of family and public life as a form of entertainment. We grow up competing in physical education classes and participating in little league, we attend or perform in Friday Night Lights in high school, and a major part of the college experience includes building identification with our institution through sport. Sport brings communities together through the entertainment it offers.

Sport as entertainment can be enjoyed as an active competitor within the sport or as a sport spectator. Either way, sport consumption involves sport communication. Sport is communicated to us visually, orally, textually, and even physically. Sport is spectacle. From the ancient days of the Roman Empire and the earliest creation of running, wrestling, boxing, or even jousting competitions, sport became spectacle by moving beyond competition and becoming entertainment. Today, we watch, discuss, read about, and participate in sport across the life span because sport as entertainment is cultivated within our cultures and enjoyed throughout our communities. People communicate about sport through online and offline social networks. We speak about sports with family and strangers, alike. And sport offers us infinite topics to discuss.

Sport and Social Justice

Sport offers a platform for social justice movements regarding a kaleidoscope of sociocultural matters because sport is all-inclusive, at least in interest and consumption. Sport is far from inclusive when we begin discussing race and gender, however; but because sport consumption is so intertwined with sport communication, sport offers a platform from which all interested parties can discuss these matters and utilize the grand stages of sport to spread messages for equality and equity as we all move forward together. More on social justice, as it relates to sports and culture, is included in Chapter 10. And in Chapter 11, we further this discussion by presenting the importance of athlete health and safety, and the conversations necessary for making sport safer and more inclusive, and how all of these sociocultural matters should remain at the forefront of strategic sport communication campaigns.

Common Perspectives for Sport Communication

Sport communication is researched and expressed from various “schools of thought” or perspectives. The two main perspectives are critical cultural studies and media studies. Critical cultural studies broadly includes race, gender, nationalism, and rhetoric. Media studies is a broad categorization that can include advertising, public relations, and journalism, to name a few. The differences between these two perspectives are slight but important. The ways in which these two perspectives are similar are 1) how we communicate and persuade regarding sport, and 2) how we present representation of and through sport in mass media. To explain, there are ten major areas of study in sport communication that can be categorized under either critical cultural studies or media studies and sometimes both. Those ten areas of sport communication include: 1) crisis, 2) gender, 3) industry, 4) marketing, 5) media, 6) nationalism, 7) mega-events, 8) race, 9) sport consumption, 10) all else (Hambrick, 2017). We communicate and provide perspective through critical cultural studies involving critical race theory, feminist theories, and rhetorical studies (Harker & Saffer, 2018). These perspectives include crisis, gender, nationalism, ability, and race, just to name a few. The media studies perspective on sport communication involves the framing and representation of all of those critical cultural matters, as well as the mass communication of the sports industry, and the promotion, marketing, consumption, and story-telling around sport. As you embark on your own campaign creation, you will no doubt come across these topical aspects of sport communication. It is important to keep in mind all the ways in which sport spans the psychological and sociological, which both perspectives convey. In Chapter 3 we discuss the psychological and sociological aspects of sport communication and in Chapter 5 we offer several qualitative and quantitative research methods that fall under both perspectives.

All combined, sport is communicated through community, as entertainment, for social justice and through various perspectives. To communicate professionally about sport, we must be thoughtful and strategic. In the next section we explain strategic communication and how sport communication and strategic communication come together as strategic sport communication.

Key Aspects of Strategic Communication

The previous section indicated how sport can be many things and how sport communication can be viewed from different perspectives. Sport communication can mean so many different things, which is why there are majors in sport communication. We are focusing on sport communication as it relates to strategic communication. Strategic communication refers to the purposeful use of communication by entities to help accomplish their goals (Frandsen & Johansen, 2017). In this section, we unpack why we choose to focus on sport communication as strategic communication.

We choose the term strategic communication to capture the array of purposive communication actions initiated by entities in sports. Public relations, advertising, and marketing communication are the three major forms of communication included in the strategic communication umbrella. Advertising tends to be the narrowest of the three. Advertising focuses on the use of paid channels (mass media and social media) to deliver messages that will create awareness of and interest in products and services. There is nonproduct advertising but that is a small part of advertising. Marketing communication reflects the promotion part of the four Ps of marketing. The other three Ps are price, product, and place. Promotion is about communicating with possible consumers about products and services. Both advertising and marketing focus primarily upon consumers and seek to sell products or services. Public relations seeks to build and to maintain relationships with a variety of stakeholders. While different from one another, these three communication functions do overlap with one another. A marketing communication effort might use both advertising and public relations. A public relations effort might use advertising. Integrated marketing communication (IMC) has argued for decades that we need to coordinate these communication functions (e.g., Manoli & Hodgkinson, 2020).

Sport Communication as Strategic Communication

Strategic communication is a perfect label to capture how sport communication is used to achieve organizational goals. Strategic communication can include not only advertising, public relations, and marketing communication, but corporate communication and organizational communication as well. So why should we view sport communication as strategic communication?

Strategic communication helps entities achieve their goals. Entities in sport would include individual athletes, teams, and leagues. All sport entities share two larger goals: 1) revenue generation and 2) favorable social evaluations. Sports entities, even those that are considered amateurs, need to generate revue to continue operations. Even college sports, which are nonprofit, need funding to play as do small, local sports entities such as Little League. Generating revenue is an essential goal for any sports entity. Favorable social evaluations attract people, including sponsors and fans, to sport entities. Social evaluation refers broadly to how stakeholders perceive the sports entity. Reputation is a form of social evaluation that most people are familiar with in some way. Reputation is a great example of how social evaluations have links to revenue generation. When you look at the valuation of a sports franchise, reputation is a major factor in determining how much a team is worth (Shea, 2018). Sports teams ...