Commercialisation

The information gained from test marketing is used by management to decide upon whether to launch the new product. If the company decide to commercialise the product which can be defined as, “introducing a new product into the market” (Kotler and Armstrong (2012), there are further implications in which the company must consider. Hair et al (2011) outlines those implications as, “the decision to commercialise the product sets several tasks in motion: ordering production materials and equipment, starting production, building inventories, shipping the product to field distribution points, training the sales force, announcing the new product to the trade, and advertising to potential customers. Therefore, once a new product has been released into the market there are ongoing factors that must be maintained, in order for the product to penetrate the market place and to identify its potential customers, to ensure the organisation remains successful/profitable and sustainable.

A sport organisation that has reached commercialisation and is arguable emerging into post-commercialisation is football which started in England in 1863. This led to the codification and formation of the Football Association and the sports first governing body (FIFA.com, 2015). The progression of the sport can be seen by Beech and Chadwick’s (2013) model shown in Figure 1. It took the sport a century between evolutionary phases of professionalization and commercialisation to recognise the commercial potential of the organisation, through the sale of broadcasting rights to BSKYB (Rodrigues, 2012) and the introduction of the English Barclays Premier League. Furthermore, Football has become one of the most participated and profitable sports in the world, with the international federation of the sport FIFA, recognising its profitability through the creation and hosting of mega events such as the Football World Cup, which is able to facilitate the sale of the organisations rights to sponsors and broadcasters.

Figure 1 Framework: the development of a sport as business.

The commercialisation of “Tri-Xtreme” will begin after the England Rugby 2015 World Cup, due to the media coverage and promotion hype surrounding the tournament in the months leading up to and the months after the World Cup, in the attempt to prevent the new organisation “Tri-Xtreme” of being over shadowed and to maximise marketing/promotional strategies. The organisation will first begin roll out to Fort William, Scotland because of the locations ability to host/sustain all three sporting activities, when this has been achieved other locations will be targeted, which are capable of adopting the sports, increasing the size/coverage of the organisation. Once these targets have been achieved, individual sports and triathlon clubs will be targeted as part of the organisations market penetration and promotional strategy, to increase participation amongst the sport. As soon as the sport has substantial numbers participating, competitions will be created to increase the sports exposure and possible revenue streams, in the attempt of expanding into new markets and taking advantage of other popular extreme sports such as skiing. In the hope of progressing the idea for professionalising the sport and creating a World Series.

References

Beech, J. and Chadwick, S. (2013). The Business of Sport Management. 2nd ed. Harlow: Pearson, p.5.

FIFA.com, (2015). Classic Football History of the Game - FIFA.com. [online] Available at: http://www.fifa.com/classicfootball/history/the-game/origins.html [Accessed 31 Jan. 2015].

Kotler, P. and Armstrong, G. (2012). Principles of Marketing. 14th ed.

McDaniel, C., Lamb, C. and Hair, J. (2011). Introduction to marketing. Mason, Ohio: South-Western.

Rodrigues, J. (2012). Premier League football at 20: 1992, the start of a whole new ball game. 

[online] the Guardian. Available at: http://www.theguardian.com/football/from-the-archive-blog/2012/feb/02/20-years-premier-league-football-1992 [Accessed 31 Jan. 2015].