Integration of relationship marketing on social media by sports brands

This paper aims at exploring relationship marketing on social media by sports brands. While more and more brands establish their presence on social media, it is important to know what kind of strategies they implement in order to meet their goals. Sports brands advertise mainly through athletes who wear their clothes and shoes while they compete, that is why this study aims to see whether the relationship with the athletes is being capitalized on by connecting them to their fans. Establishing what strategies of integrating relationship marketing by sports brands has been accomplished through studying tweets of Adidas Tennis and Nike Tennis accounts. Tennis has been chosen as a single sport to study, as it allows to have a greater look at individual tennis player relationship with a brand and through the brand with their fans. This study has taken a qualitative approach and has involved creating initial and final coding categories of the tweets. In total 400 tweets were selected to analyze as a grounded theory research. Conclusions have been reached that certain facets of relationship marketing are being utilized as marketing strategies, such as trust, engagement, commitment. Additionally, it became clear that using celebrity athletes for creating trust and engagement are a focal point of relationship marketing strategy on Twitter, and also what fans are coming to social media for.