Building international relationships through social media marketing : a netnography of football communities

Fenton, A

Abstract

McCarthy, et al (2014) undertook a multiple case study of social media and
football clubs and found that “There is considerable scope for enhanced
understanding of the way in which fans, members and customers will evolve
their engagement with brands through social media over the next few years.”
Understanding the benefits and challenges of digital marketing and
communications for sports clubs in the digital age is an important aspect of the
evolving discipline of Digital Marketing. Cooperstein, (2013) highlighted that we
have moved from the age of information (1990-2010), to the age of the customer
where massive IT investments and billions of people interacting online have
created a wave of massive, disruptive change to business. Football clubs are
examples of high impact brands with loyal customers who are using social media
to reach out to international audiences.

This paper uses empirical evidence using a netnography approach to explore and
evaluate this phenomenon. Netnography is now a well established, twenty year
old method of conducting ethnography online (Kozinets 2015). Given the
quantity of people online and the amount of data in the public domain,
Netnography has been described as “faster, simpler, and less expensive than
traditional ethnography, and more naturalistic and unobtrusive than focus
groups or interviews” (Kozinets 2002). This study uses the blended qualitative
methods of online participant observation, interviews and social network
analysis to evaluate the effect of relationships between international football
fans and the clubs that they support.

Cooperstein, D. M. 2013. “Competitive Strategy in the Age of the Customer,”
Forrester report, October10 (available at
http://boxonline.s3.amazonaws.com/SM/Forrester_Age_of_Customer_Repo
rt.pdf).
Kozinets, R. V. 2015. Netnography Redefined Sage, SAGE Publications (available at
https://uk.sagepub.com/en-gb/eur/netnography/book242765).
Kozinets, R. V. R. 2002. “The field behind the screen: using netnography for
marketing research in online communities,” Journal of marketing research
(39:1), pp. 61–72 (available at
http://journals.ama.org/doi/abs/10.1509/jmkr.39.1.61.18935).
McCarthy, J., Rowley, J., Ashworth, C. J., and Pioch, E. 2014. “Managing brand
presence through social media: the case of UK football clubs,” Internet
Research (24:2), Emerald Group Publishing Limited, pp. 181–204 (available
at http://www.emeraldinsight.com/journals.htm?issn=1066-
2243&volume=24&issue=2&articleid=17106747&show=html).

Citation

Fenton, A. Building international relationships through social media marketing : a netnography of football communities. Presented at Contemporary Issues in International Marketing

• Presentation Conference Type: Other
• Conference Name: Contemporary Issues in International Marketing
• Deposit Date: Jun 7, 2018
• Publicly Available Date: Jun 7, 2018
• Additional Information: Event Type : Conference