Analysis Of Ambush Marketing Phenomenon And Evasive Strategies In Sport Events

International major sports events have always attract people’s attention, and nodoubts the big companies’. Even though the2008Beijing Olympic Game had beencriticized of overly commercialized,2012London Olympic Game still receivednumerous applications for sponsorship. After nearly30years’development, sports eventsponsorship have become an indispensable part of the sports commercial industry.Similarly, from the aspect of sports event organization, sponsorship revenue is critical tothe event operation and further development. As a result, ambush marketer conductpromotion activities associated with sport event without paying any sponsorship fee,thus intrude the rights of the authorized sponsor and threaten the continuously existenceof the sports event itself. Therefore, in recent decade, we can see anti-ambush marketingstrategy became the most important issue of the sports event preparation procedure. Thehost countries and districts were required to offer anti-ambush marketing plan in thebiding procedure, and their executive abilities were also needed to be examined. Alongwith the completing legislation and the accumulated tackle experiences, the living spacefor ambush marketing is shrinking, but still its scale and influence should not beunderestimated and is worth to pay great attention and kept fighting against.This article is mainly focused on the nature of ambush marketing. Throughmethods of literature survey and comparative study, ambush marketing activities andsponsorship marketing examples, which occurred during the past major eventworldwide, have been examined and concluded. Besides, some suggestions about howto avoid and tackl with ambush marketing were introduced. In the first part comes theintroduction of the purpose and the methods of research. Then the second part present aliterature review of sponsorship and ambush marketing from different aspects. The thirdpart of the article are about brief history and motivations of ambush marketing, andclassification of common ambush marketing strategies, such as sponsor event media,extend rights of sponsor in secondary level, purchase advertising period around thecompetitor sponsored event, carry out promotion near the event stadium, sponsor athlete, use implied language and etc. Then, the negative effects to sports event owner, officialsponsor and ambush marketer are revealed. Further more, in part4, some suggestions tocounter ambush marketing strategies are proposed, such as counter pre-eventeducational promotion and public relation work, complete sports event leverage designand related contracts, enhance the legal means and executive procedure.The purpose of the article is to come to a better comprehension and understandingof ambush marketing, and try to find a way to solve the increasingly conflicts betweenevent sponsorship and ambush marketing. However, to what degree limited ambushmarketing can sustain the balance between their contrary interests demand, is still needtime to figure it out. Under current situation, with insufficient time and unclearlyoutcome of performed anti-ambush practices, offer unproved solution would end up invain. Therefore, the article accomplished nothing but some thoughts and suggestions,which require much more cases and practices to fulfill and perfect in future, in hopingof be able to help or enlighten the follow researchers in this field, so as to make somecontribution to the optimum development of domestic sport event marketplace.