ABSTRACT

The world of marketing is an ever-changing landscape. At the dawn of the marketing era, marketers reached consumers through traditional channels such as print media, radio spots, and elaborate television commercials. Today, consumers are bombarded with messages through traditional channels, but also myriad new, and more specifically directed vehicles such as text messaging, email, social media and customized Internet advertising. The landscape is saturated with media messages from every conceivable angle. From television commercials to in-show and stadium advertising to billboards and signs, media marketing is impossible to avoid. The simple act of tuning into network television guarantees the presence of advertisements. Sport marketers have increasingly looked to a relationship marketing approach to their job to identify ways to make their product stand out in the mind of the consumer and new media enhances the consumers’ ability to build an association in their mind (Bee and Kahle, 2006).