Social Media Usage among Sport Governing Bodies for Developing Brand Awareness: The case of Ecuadorian National Sport Federations

Abstract

National Sport Governing Bodies such as National Sport Federations (NSF´s) are non-profit organizations that receive less media attention and budgets compared to professional and mediated sports. Therefore, they are looking for alternative methods by which they can get more self-funding resources to increase fans, develop athletes, gain market positioning, create awareness, build loyalty, and project quality. Hence, they are trying to adapt and include new technologies to adjust the demands of the modern sports industry. Moreover, the rise of social media has profoundly influenced the delivery and consumption of sport. Because of this, National Sport Federations are part of a segment of the sport´s industry that could benefit from the use of social media, a new and inexpensive marketing communication´s tool.

Significantly, the new trends of sport marketing suggest that NSF´s should be managed as brands. Whereby, brand equity becomes the final stage in developing a successful brand. Nonetheless, brand awareness becomes the first crucial step to achieve brand equity. However, sport governing bodies such as NSF´s have a particular case, they do not build up a name from zero, they are brands already created by the country name, Olympic characteristic, and the name of the sport.

Furthermore, forty-seven National Sport Federations constitute the Olympic system in the country. Correspondingly, from the policies given by the Sports Ministry for Ecuadorian NSF´s to have their annual budgets approved, the most significant one is that no money can be destined for marketing activities.

Therefore, this research intended to be a guideline to identify how social media among sport governing bodies can contribute to the development of brand awareness, particularly in the Ecuadorian NSF´s. Hence, this investigation intents to know how extensive is the usage of social media, the factors that allow using this tool, and the benefits and/or limitations. Lastly, what consequences have brought social media to brand awareness.

Thus, an exploratory research with a qualitative approach was used in this investigation. In addition, direct observation and in-depth interviews were the chosen methods to collect the data from ten Ecuadorian NSF´s divided into three categories according to the usage of their Social Media Sites (high, medium, and low). For that, two variables were considered: number of followers and number of active SNS´s available.

The results of the investigation concluded that there are 133 existing SNS´s out of 230, representing a 57% respectively. However, only 37% of this SNS´s are being used actively. Moreover, the factors that allowed the use of social media are self-funding and president´s resources. Besides, the benefits obtained are new sponsors, athletes, fans, an increase of stakeholders, low-cost advertisement, sports promotion, organization awareness, and event management. In contrast, the limitations are content creation, trolls, critics, money, and time. Lastly, the consequences of the usage of social media to brand awareness are two: increase of brand awareness by reaching a new local audience and sports successes have drawn the attention of the sporting public to recognize NSF´s as governing bodies of the different sports available in the country.

Therefore, the investigation suggests that social media is a fundamental tool to be used in NSF´s to start developing the organization as a brand to find more self-funding resources and maintain public interest until the money distribution policies changes in Ecuador.