ABSTRACT
Sports have become an important marketing vehicle for many organisations. Sponsors and advertisers often seek an association with the positive characteristics of sport to boost their own brands (Funk, Alexandris, & McDonald, 2008; Wang & Kaplanidou, 2013). Accordingly, sports marketing has emerged from the general marketing literature as an important sub-discipline with its own unique characteristics and features. Despite the relationship between sport and drugs being widely understood in marketing contexts, it is a surprising omission from sports marketing texts (e.g. Chadwick, Chanavat, & Desbordes, 2016). While there is interest in the notion of customer promise management (the warrant that delivery of sports-related products and services are consistent with the rules-and values-based expectations that form the basis of the trust relationship), drugs in sport receive very little research attention from a marketing perspective (Prior, O’Reilly, Mazanov, & Huybers, 2013). The discussion of marketing, integrity management and drugs in sport therefore has value in terms of drawing together the literature on the field, but also points to where deeper consideration of the issue by sports marketing may be warranted. Rather than attempt to address the breadth that marketing scholarship allows (e.g. consumer behaviour, brand loyalty or communications), the discussion focuses on three very different challenges for sports marketing arising from drug control-led integrity management. The first explores the issues that have emerged from the relationship sport has had with advertising and sponsorship of licit drugs, and how they inform marketing of new drugs (e.g. e-cigarettes). The second arises from the increasing difficulties sport faces in managing the integrity of the ‘customer promise’ in the face of drug-related scandals, usually interpreted as a form of product harm crisis management and service failure management focusing on how the organisation can recover sales in the wake of such incidents. The third challenge comes from the implications arising from the use of anti-doping as a marketing device.
