Using public relations in sports

Headnote

Abstract: The efficiency of a company's activity resides in designing and managing a long term relationship with the athletes, spectators, sponsors and community. The relationship with any of these four shareholders can be addressed through public relations, a marketing communication technique that brings value both for the company sending the message, and for other categories interested in its well-being. The purpose of this paper is to introduce the reader to the relationships between PR and sports. It explores how sports public relations practitioners have developed a range of successful strategies and tactics for influencing media coverage, and supporting the sport's domains. The authors conclude that the effective use of Public Relations in sport can generate conversion, facilitate sport representatives positioning, and maintain continued sport sustenance.

Keywords: Public relations; Sport; Media; Communications

JEL classification: M31

1. Introduction

This paper aims to explore links between public relations and sport. Considering that sport is both international and a part of everydaj' life, it implies a role for public relations (PR). International sports PR focuses on media relations, media rights, promotional and publicity work, sponsorship, event management and fan relationships. Major public relations consultancies have specialized in sports sections, but there are also a number of dedicated agencies offering a range of PR, marketing and sponsorship services.

Sport, which in the modern age is both politics and business, is an arena for debate and discourses about elites, resource allocation, privilege, deprivation, exploitation, justice, nationalism, racism, gender, age, the body, ideologies, and religion. Public relations work, whether or not it is formally acknowledged as such, facilitates the international and national debates around such issues. Sports public relations goes way beyond sport and is intrinsically political. (L'Etang, 2006).

Public relations' role as dissacourse management makes critical interventions in the public sphere on behalf of clients, and is thus implicated in the shaping of public communication on a range of significant political, economic, sociocultural and technological issues that arise from sports praxis and business.

2. Literature

While public relations literature has traditionally considered PR as a promotion and communication tool, this article acknowledges that in the world of sport, public relations has a much more sophisticated role to play.

Despite the ever increasing importance of public relations in the modern...