This master thesis concerns the use of content marketing in a sports context.
The topic of the thesis is a result of my attraction towards marketing,
sports marketing, and new media, which are some of a numbers of fields,
that I have worked with throughout my education in Communications at Aalborg
University. The objective with this thesis is to link these fields to contribute
to a better understanding of the term content marketing and how
companies can use this type of marketing in their strategic communication.
The term content marketing is a term, which has developed it’s meaning
through the last five years or so, and is therefore relatively unknown
to the academic field of knowledge. But if you take a look at the
most popular terms of marketing at present, then you will definitely find
content marketing in the top three. Therefore it’s interesting to take
a closer look at the field of content marketing and how it can be used at
a market that has a high degree of engagement among the target groups.
The introduction to this master thesis sheds some light at the exact definition
of content marketing developed from sources of practitioners and
of statistics that can help showing, why an exploration of content marketing
is required to understand its relevance in e. g. the sports market.
The next part takes its course with an overview over the target groups in the
sports universe as well as determining people’s needs for socializing with each
other through communications. It’s based on the theories of the French sociologist
Pierre Bourdieu (1986, 1994, 1996) and the American professor Daniel
C. Funk (2008) who specializes in consumer involvement in the sports industry.
The third part is used as an examination of two cases in the sports industry
where content marketing is being used. The first case selected is the
American sports manufacturing company Nike’s use of the smart phone
and web application Nike+ to facilitate relations between users using knowledge
about their motivations and characteristics. The second case is the
Austrian company Red Bull’s use of viral video communications where they
seek to gain publicity while engaging with the consumers in their world.
Through the analysis of the two cases I found that content marketing can be used
as a facilitator to constructing relations between the people in the given target
group and between people and the brands itself. Therefore content marketing is
an effective strategy for communicating in the universe of sports. As a result of
the analysis, the master thesis is rounded off with eight bullet points to show how
content marketing can be an influential tool of marketing in the sports business.