Oli Shawyer
Sports Marketing Summit

Sports marketing is going through one of the most radical periods the industry has seen. From significant shifts in sports rights to the way brands collaborate with teams and associations, and the power athletes have to control their own brand destiny. Everything is shifting and the potential to win big is immense.
The Mumbrella Sports Marketing Summit will cover the biggest changes in sports from a range of perspectives – media owners, athletes, sports teams, brand marketers, agencies and more. Whether it’s eSports, sports activations, consumption habits, ownership and rights or challenges with partnerships, the summit will give delegates the confidence to hit their marketing strategy for six.
And I'm excited to be a part of it all with my session on: Is Sports Marketing Unique - a professor and sports marketer explain.
Together with Professor Heath McDonald who I've been working closely with for some time now, we're going to unpack whether sports brands should be managed differently because sports marketing has unique aspects.
With purposeful reference to Byron Sharp, law-like patterns have consistently been found to explain and predict consumer behaviour across a wide range of industries. But there has been great speculation that these empirical generalisations may not hold in the case of professional team sport brands.
However, through Heath's work, the applicability of law-like generalisations to professional team sports has been tested and shown. Together, he and I will present through theory and application what these patterns hold, showcasing that the unique aspects of the sports market do not impact meaningfully on consumer behaviour.
In concluding that sports brands should not be managed differently and should operate in line with what we know about other consumer markets, I will also then cover off the reality of transferring that insight and theory to practicality on a day-to-day basis within the walls of one of Australia’s most successful sporting club’s competing in one of Australia’s most successful sports.
The summit is locked in for Thursday 4 July at the Four Seasons Hotel in Sydney.