Research On The Network Marketing Strategy Of Large-scale Sport Events In China

Sport marketing plays an important role in the determination of the success or failure of sport events. As regards this once-a-year, large-scale, obviously competitive and invisible consumer-focused product, our marketing concept is relatively backward, and the marketing means is relatively single, which means traditional marketing methods have gradually lost influence, and we urgently need to create a new marketing platform. After the technological reform in the information age, network marketing becomes a new marketing method. As the representatives of large-scale sport events in China, China Open has always attached importance to the usage of network marketing from 2004. Therefore, the study selected China Open as the case, by literature, interviews, case analysis, comparative analysis, surveys methods, systematically analyze network marketing strategy, and try to build a general model of network marketing strategy of large-scale sport events in China.The study shows that the network marketing of China Open has gone through two stages:the initial stage (2004-2008) and the developing stage (2009-present). In the entire process, it comprehensively applied the following strategy:official website, search engine, online advertisement, web2.0 (microblog, SNS, interactive community), online research, etc, and integrate webpage strategy, product strategy, pricing strategy, promotion strategy and customer service strategy into a complete marketing combination. Webpage strategy includes registering domain name and the URL, designing web pages, operating and maintaining the site; Product strategy includes the ornamental products and participatory products (official souvenir, online games, APP application); Pricing strategy includes low-cost penetration and differential pricing; Promotional strategies includes multimedia publicity, cooperative sponsorship, promotional activities, and stars participation; Customer service strategy includes search in official website, e-mail, online services. All these strategies systematically summarize the general characteristics of the network marketing strategies of large-scale sport events in China, have a certain degree of representativeness.However, although network marketing strategy for China Open has been relatively mature, there still exist the issues in lacking of experience, data support, innovation, the use of official website and human resources. As for marketing strategy, compared with Shanghai Masters, China Open has advantages in network domain setting, the network cooperation platform and search engine, but in the promotion of tennis culture, the cultivation of loyal tennis enthusiasts it still needs to be further improved; Compared with the U. S., China Open needs to be further enhanced on setting the content and features of official website and maintaining the website. To this end, the study put forward the following recommendations:strengthen the professional training of talents and reserve the talents who are both good at sports and marketing; perfect personalized service system and enhance the network marketing throughout the year; broaden the channel of network marketing and improve the profit mode; build network marketing strategy with the feature of China Open and enhance the initiative sense of competition; improve the network security system to ensure the safety of consumption.