July 9, 2004 - Today's Other News Items

Sports Marketing Book Debuts

Sports marketing is a relatively new and rapidly growing specialty, much different than general consumer marketing. One of the leading experts in the field is University of Oregon's Lynn Kahle, whose new book, "Sports Marketing and the Psychology of Marketing Communication" (Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2004) is now in bookstores across the nation.

Kahle and co-editor Chris Riley, a Portland media planner, assembled the best scholars on the subject and spent five years compiling a work that defines the state of the art of the psychology of sports marketing. The book is sponsored by the Society for Consumer Psychology and is part of its advertising and consumer psychology series. "People are so intense and passionate about their sports, and because of that, marketing works very differently than with other products," says Kahle. The book covers three main topics -- selling sports as entertainment, building sports participation and using sports to sell non-sport products and services.

Kahle, who came to UO in 1983, was one of the university's marketing and consumer behavior professors who answered the challenge 15 years ago when the Portland Trail Blazers asked the institution to develop sports marketing expertise, which at that time was almost non-existent in the nation's business schools. Five years later, UO founded the James H. Warsaw Sports Marketing Center, today an internationally known source of expertise in the field.

"Oregon is a perfect place to study sports marketing," Kahle adds. "We have an unusually high concentration of sports marketing companies in the state, with about 100 of them just in the Portland area."