Goal Development and Marketing Evaluation: A Qualitative Examination of Goals in the Marketing of Intercollegiate Athletics

Intercollegiate athletics is a multi-billion dollar segment of the sport industry. While no college sport brings in as much revenue and attracts more media attention than football, this sport also often provides benefits to each participating university by highlighting school spirit, evoking pride in the institution, and increasing donations. Previous scholars (e.g., Simmons et al., 2017) have examined intercollegiate athletics and sport marketing, primarily by examining the consumer perspective (e.g., motivations, constraints), but not necessarily investigating the organizational or practitioner perspective of the marketing exchange. This study sought to address this gap by examining the perceptions and actions of those (i.e., football sport marketing directors [N=14]) tasked with marketing the sport within one particular conference (i.e., Big Ten Conference). The emerging themes from the collected data reviewed two major themes: goal development and goals; marketing evaluation. Within the theme goal development and goals were the subthemes of information gathering, goal alignment, primary goals, and secondary goals. Within the theme marketing evaluation were the subthemes of standard evaluation methods, informal evaluation methods, and no evaluation method.