Amateur Sports
Uploaded by natalie227 on Nov 18, 2008
The Cause Of Amateur Sport in Canada
Pepsi, Coca-Cola, Pizza Pizza, Visa, Nike, I’m assuming all these names are sounding familiar. Sponsors are everywhere today. The first thing that pops into my mind when I think Sponsorship is the never ending stream of ads for sponsors along the sides of the hockey boards. The actual explanation of sponsorship is based on an exchange between sponsor and sponsored, and pursues marketing (communications) objectives by exploiting the association between the two” (Walliser, 2003). Sponsorship deals with huge amounts of money! Sponsorship of sport has exploded into a 31 million dollar industry in the US. Obviously the whole point of sponsorship is to make businesses look good in the eye of the public and draw in business. Sponsorship can be broken down into five categories, which include sponsorship of sport in general, sponsorship of a particular sport, sponsorship of a competition within a sport, sponsorship of a team within a competition, and sponsorship of an individual sportsman (Abratt, Clayton & Pitt, 1987). Although there are five categories of sponsorship Irwin and Asimakopoulos felt that sponsorship has two main objectives; corporate objective and product objective. Sandler and Shani disagreed with there only being two objectives. They believe there are three objectives; corporate objectives, marketing objectives, and media objectives.
In Canada sponsorship has reached a figure between $375 million and $750 million! Corporations are gathering more and more information on what type of sponsorship tactics to use in order to draw people to think there company has good intentions. They have determined that an environmentally conscious approach draws in a large amount of consumers. Very clever methods some corporations are using are their name brands being linked to certain causes to make you think of them as doing for our society. It is for certain that the burden of social concerns is being shifted from the government onto large corporations.
This is very important for me to realize how brand names are not necessarily trying to help out a cause but they are doing so purely to make you think of them in a better light and buy more products. I find it a bit frightening because it seems that you can’t trust anything you read anymore. I remember buying and wearing the classic yellow live strong bracelet and feeling good that I helped support an organization to fight cancer, which was done but it is...