Changing the sport product: marketing implications for championship rugby league clubs in the United Kingdom

Abstract

Professional sports teams and leagues, such as the Rugby Football League (RFL) operate in a crowded market; thus, have made league structure changes to attempt to remain competitive in the marketplace. However, there is little understanding of the implications on strategic marketing planning when such league structure changes are made. DesignUsing semi-structured interviews with 11 (out of a possible 12) second-tier RFL club executives and 1 national governing body executive (n=12) were interviewed to understand the strategic marketing implications of league structure changes. FindingsWe found very few clubs had a marketing strategy, therefore, engaged in very little strategic marketing planning. Furthermore, we identified the main barriers were resource and skills, and, organisation and leadership. Practical ImplicationsThe RFL and other leagues going through structural changes need to concentrate on making sustainable shared resources which develop capabilities. For example, developing a standardised yet mouldable strategic marketing package would reduce the financial and knowledge resource barriers. Research ContributionThis paper adds to a small body of literature that empirically investigates the barriers to strategic marketing practices within professional sports organisations. It also adds provides brings lower-tier professional sport clubs into focus, which are often overlooked.

The Philosophy of Sport and Physical Education: Four Decade Publication Trends via Scientometric Evaluation

“…Due to the importance of sport and physical education, research has been carried out on most of the topics related to sport as a drama (Kreft, 2012), transgender athletes (Gleaves & Lehrbach, 2016), national identity formation (Morgan, 1997), competition (Katz et al al., 2021;Nguyen, 2017), economics (Davies, 2010;Drewes et al, 2021), culture (Ekholm & Sol, 2020;J. Williams, 2011), education (Fasting et al, 2014;Hager, 2016), marketing (Mackreth & Bond, 2020;Tsiotsou, 2016), management (Chelladurai, 2018;Emery et al, 2012), tourism (Shipway, 2011;Weed, 2020), industry (Vamplew, 2016;Zhan, 2016 ), politics (Liston et al, 2013;Strittmatter et al, 2018), migration (Maguire, 2008;Orlowski et al, 2016), student-athlete (Monda et al, 2016;Weber et al, 2019 ), college (Loland & McNamee, 2016;Won et al, 2013), women (AlKhalifa & Farello, 2020Scelles & Pfister, 2021), children (Hibshman et al, 2021;Karlsson et al, 2021), recreational education (Cottrell & Cottrell, 2020;Rodrigues & Payne, 2015), values (Grohs et al, 2019;Woratschek et al, 2014), drugs (Krieger et al, 2018;…”