Improving sport brands’ reputation through marketing events

The rationale of this paper is to highlight how a marketing event can be used as a promotional tool by a sporting organization. A case study approach has been chosen for the demonstration. The major findings of the research are that integrating a marketing event in the promotional mix can help a football league to better identify itself with its target consumers and to increase its brand value, while also offering an unforgettable experience for the participants. There are two important implications this paper could have. The first one would be to help researchers and practicioners realize that there is a difference between a sporting event and a marketing event. The confusion will be cleared in the Introduction of the case study. The second one would be to show sport marketers how a given event can be marketed. Therefore, the paper makes another difference, between „marketingevents” and „eventmarketing. Eventmarketing represents the core of the paper: the stages of event production, event promotion and event distribution (consumption) are largely investigated.