Essay for field assignment - Sports Marketing:

Event: BC LIONS GAME

This fieldwork assignment is an opportunity for you to connect theories and ideas from class lectures and course material to real events by getting "out of the classroom." The purpose of this assignment is to give you the chance to explore onsite and later analyze an actual professional sporting event in the Metro Vancouver area (or beyond). You will relate your experiences and observations to some key themes in sports and event marketing.

1) Explain your previous/current interest in the chosen sport and/or team. Was it your first time at the selected venue and sport? How different was it to attend and watch a live sporting event, not as a regular spectator, but from a sports marketer's viewpoint? How would you compare this experience to watching the same team/sport on TV? 2) From a spectator standpoint, what were the highlights of the event? What are the areas of improvement? (Disregard team results or players' performance and focus instead on the event itself.) 3) From a sports marketer perspective, what are the game day initiatives that caught your attention and why? Please describe one of the onsite initiatives, whether it was effective and what you would have done differently if you were responsible for this particular promotional activity. 4) Using at least two examples, name and discuss at least two types of sponsorship (based on concepts from your textbook) that you were able to identify on game day. 5) Based on your game day observations, what was the overall profile(s) of game spectators' and how could this information be used by the home team marketers in attracting possible sponsors and advertisers, thereby increasing revenue potential? 6) Using actual brands' initiatives onsite, discuss their marketing rationale in choosing to use this venue (and sport) as a channel to reach their target market(s). Explain why you think that the sponsor has or has not implemented an effective strategy. 7) Using at least two examples, name at least two types of advertisement (based on concepts from your textbook) that you were able to identify on game day, and that represent an effort to sell a sports product. Now select one of these ads and discuss what are the marketing and communication goals that you think it is attempting to achieve. 8) Using examples from your field experience, how do the home team sports marketers use the concept of "peripheral product" to add value to the core product? Would you recommend any changes to the core or peripheral product strategies? (Chapter 7) 9) Describe how technology was used (or not) to enhance the spectator game day experience. Provide examples and your recommendations for the near future. Use concepts from your text (Chapter 12) and ideas from other existing venues, citing your sources. 10) Discuss the most interesting, profound, and/or surprising insight or experience you gained from the field trip. You may focus on a single topic or discuss something that relates to several observations. Describe your insight or experience, explain why it was so striking, and relate it to a theme or concept from a course reading or news article. Again, you also need to draw from at least one of the course readings and cite this source correctly.