Sports public relations PDF

Preview

Summary

Public Relations Review 34 (2008) 87–89 Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Public Relations Review Editorial Sports public relations Our ambition in writing the ‘Call for papers’ in the area of sports public relations was to open up a field which we felt warranted deeper reflection. Issues re...

Description

Public Relations Review 34 (2008) 87–89

Contents lists available at ScienceDirect

Public Relations Review

Editorial

Sports public relations

Our ambition in writing the ‘Call for papers’ in the area of sports public relations was to open up a field which we felt warranted deeper reflection. Issues related to public relations have been addressed in sports studies, sports marketing and events management literature and public relations is a fundamental part of the sports media complex. Yet attention to sports public relations has been somewhat sporadic (Anderson, 2001, 2006; Irwin, Sutton, & McCarthy, 2002; Nichols, Moynahan, Hall, & Taylor, 2002; Hopwood, 2005a; Hopwood, 2005b; Hopwood, 2005c; Hopwood, 2007; Hopwood and Edwards, in press; L’Etang, 2006a; L’Etang, 2006b; L’Etang, Falkheimer, & Lugo, 2007; Mullin, Hardy, & Sutton, 2007; Pedersen, Miloch, & Laucella, 2007; Stoldt, Dittmore, & Branvold, 2006; Parks, Quarterman, & Thibault, 2007). Indeed, this special issue can be seen as a (somewhat belated) response to Neupauer’s ‘plea for helping an unknown field’ articulated in the Sage Handbook of Public Relations (Neupauer, 2001: 551–556). We aimed to draw attention to the considerable scope that sport has for public relations practice in the field and for applied and critical scholarship. At a functional level, public relations has the potential to contribute to many areas of sport including: elite (professional) sport, mass participation (amateur leisure and recreation), spectator and media sport and the promotion of sport as part of healthy living. In practice, public relations merges with marketing and events management and is often strongly focused on publicity, highlighting issues in relation to public relations roles and encroachment. Yet sports PR has more profound cultural implications. Sport is a global cultural and business practice and thus shapes relationships at diplomatic, political, cultural, economic, organisational, community and interpersonal levels. Sport is an arena for debate and discourses about elites, resource allocation, privilege, deprivation, exploitation, justice, nationalism, racism, gender, age, the body, ideologies, and religion. Public relations’ role as discourse management (Pieczka, 1999) makes critical interventions in the public sphere on behalf of clients, and is thus implicated in the shaping of public communication on a range of significant political, economic, socio-cultural and technological issues that arise from sports praxis and business. Our Call stimulated a wide-ranging and international response. Contributions were diverse embracing functional and critical work. We were particularly delighted at the inter-disciplinary nature of contributions and varied methodologies, which we feel has resulted in richly textured articles that combine empirical data with a variety of concepts and terminology. Pleasingly noticeable too was the wide range of cultural reference that contextualised public relations work more broadly than is sometimes the case. Our selection opens with Dimitrov’s ‘Gender violence, fan activism and public relations in sport’. Her article is based on extensive empirical research into the gender violence against women in Australian football. She contrasts the communication strategies of two official, resource-rich organizations – the National Rugby League (NRL) and the Australian Football League (AFL) – and the unofficial resource-poor fan advocacy group, Football Fans against Sexual Assault (FFASA). Dimitrov explains how professionalization has resulted in mediatization and industrialization requiring public relations news, issues, risk, and sometimes crisis management. A series of sexual assaults perpetrated against women provoked a critical response from a group that proved adept at media relations, astute messaging and internet useage. Dimitrov explores the way in which the centrepiece of the campaign – the ‘Purple Armband Games’ – was promulgated as a concept and brand that then developed into a fundraising movement. Dimitrov’s analysis neatly captures the dynamic of inter-institutional and fan relationships around a social issue and the public relations styles, which resulted from these. 0363-8111/$ – see front matter © 2008 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.pubrev.2008.05.001

88

Editorial / Public Relations Review 34 (2008) 87–89

‘Player transgressions’ are also the focus of Wilson, Stavros, and Westberg who explore the management of sport sponsor relations. Their research is based on in-depth interviews with executives representing Australian team-based sporting organizations and explores the effects of transgressions such as ‘drug use, assault, driving offences, gambling and on-field violence’ on sponsor relationships. Wilson et al link marketing and public relations concepts in their discussion of ‘listening posts’ and symmetrical communication, and develop a conceptual model to explain the relationships between key elements related to player transgressions and subsequent sponsor responses. They position their work within the relationship management approach but also highlight the centrality of media relations and suggest that ‘the two-way symmetrical approach is not appropriate in all aspects of managing player transgressions’. High-profile scandals are also centre stage in Bruce and Tini’s article on crisis response strategies. Based in New Zealand their research is focused on rugby league in Australasia and uses textual analysis as a methodology to analyse media coverage of an Australasian men’s rugby league cup scandal. Their data is usefully linked to existing frameworks in crisis communication. Their analysis leads them to suggest a new term for a particular crisis response strategy they term diversion to limit successfully the damage to an organization’s reputation. Image repair is the focus of several contributions from US-based authors: Fortunato, Jerome, Brazeal and Pfahl and Bates. Fortunato’s work has some links with that of Dimitrov, Wilson et al and Bruce and Tini, since the focus is on sexual assault by players. In this case the players were from a university lacrosse team. Fortunato uses frameworks of image restoration and message framing to offer insights into the case in question and suggests some long-term evaluation strategies that could be implemented by the university. Jerome takes a framework – the rhetoric of atonement – that has previously only been used to analyse political cases and applies it to a stock car racing champion who assaulted a journalist after a disappointing race. As there had been previous incidents of volatile behaviour by the champion as well as physical altercations between drivers and team members, there was a swift, extensive and hostile media response. Jerome carefully distinguishes between the strategy of atonement from that of mortification and provides a considered meta-analysis of the framework she employs. Pfahl and Bates also use motor sport as the basis for their article. They use a framework of image restoration to analyse a crisis experienced by the lucrative Formula One. They too, discuss apologia and use textual analysis to provide an in-depth insight into the rhetoric of various stakeholders in their chosen case, making the important point that ‘not all image repair strategies are conducted by a single actor’. They also suggest that a useful area of future research could be at ‘the intersection of liability, image and organizational practices and relationships’. Brazeal’s contribution, like Jerome’s, focuses on a case of personal public relations in relation to an American Football League’s star player, whose behaviour has been difficult and whose ‘public persona is not easy to promote’. Her work highlights a key problem and pressure point for celebrities – the erosion of private space. Brazeal clearly draws out the rhetorical strategies employed by the athlete and his ‘surrogates’, and the reasons for their eventual failure. She concludes that ‘for athletes faced with apologizing, it is critical to embrace the values of their sports . . . such reaffirmations help heal broken relationships with an athlete’s various publics and allow for the athlete’s restoration to the community’ and suggests that future research might analyse such cases from cultural studies or feminist perspectives. Staying with American football, the former National Football League’s Commissioner “Pete” Rozelle and his particular approach to public relations forms the focus of Anderson’s article. This article presents an intriguing historical perspective on Rozelle’s undoubted impact on the NFL during the 1960s. It illustrates how one individual successfully used his media relations background and acumen to help make the NFL one of America’s major sports at that time. Batchelor and Formentin focus on the rebuilding of relationships following a lengthy labor dispute between players of the National Hockey League in the USA. Thus intrinsic to this article is the industrialization of sport and the consequential distortions of power between bosses, players and media. The approach taken by Batchelor and Formentin is strongly influenced by marketing and they discuss the on-going political struggle between public relations and marketing. Their own work takes an integrated communications approach to an exploration of the re-branding of the League based on media and web analysis and qualitative in-depth interviews. Their historical review of the crisis records that the NHL’s response after the lock-out was to announce ‘that it signed multiple deals with public relations and marketing companies in an effort to improve its communications’. Their analysis also highlights the limits of practitioners’ knowledge and practice in relation to evaluation and the limits of a publicity-driven approach to public relations. Mitrook, Parish and Seltzer apply the contingency theory of accommodation as a framework for understanding how one team in the US National Basketball Association – Orlando Magic – tried to secure a franchise. Their analysis, based on interviews and media content analysis, illustrates how the organization moved along the continuum between total advocacy to total accommodation, and emphasises the importance of community relations. Also based in the USA, Woo, An and Cho focus on virtual community relations and present a technically based analysis of message board use on sports websites. Operating within the dominant paradigm they argue that message boards are ‘an excellent place to build a two-way symmetrical relationship between sports organizations and their key public, sports fans’. They also draw on communications and media studies in the design of their study, which utilises the uses and gratifications approach to audiences. The final three articles take sports public relations into more unusual territory. Summers and Morgan are based in Australia and their focus is on the influence of PR and the media on ‘the complex nature of sporting celebrity’ in relation to fans. Their discussion implies that considerable power lies with the media, and that internet use allows fans to publicise their own interpretations. Summers and Morgan used multiple methods in exploring the views of sports audiences about sports celebrities. Their research shows there is a need for ‘sporting organizations to consider their social and ethical responsibility in relation to the creation and ongoing management of sporting celebrities’. Writing from New Zealand, Desmarais and Bruce

Editorial / Public Relations Review 34 (2008) 87–89

89

focus on the influence of live media coverage in shaping the relationship between a sport and its publics. Their study is based on extensive discourse analysis of a decade of broadcasts. The focus of their research is a series of rugby union (as opposed to rugby league) football games between France (Les Bleus) and New Zealand (The All Blacks), based on interviews with well-known French and New Zealand rugby union broadcasters, and explores patriotic discourses that mobilise nationalistic subject positions, and discourses of national identity, often through the use of stereotypes such as French unpredictability, passion, excitability or volatility. This entails exploring popular metaphors such as ‘rugby panache’ and ‘rugby champagne’, and linguistic labels such as style or flair. Desmarais and Bruce convincingly argue that ‘live sport announcers act more like ambassadors and enthusiastic fans than objective reporters’, a view that is supported by other empirical research into sports journalism (Boyle, 2006) and that sports journalists often strive ‘to create a positive public image for the sport they represent’. Their reference to Fortunato’s earlier work helps to make this issue both inter-textual and conversational between those who share the passion of sport. Sports broadcasters are defined as ‘cultural intermediaries’ (Nixon & du Gay, 2002; Hodges, 2006; Curtin & Gaither, 2005). Thus, Desmarais and Bruce’s work is clearly positioned as part of the small cultural studies paradigm within public relations, exploring its role in ‘promotional culture’ (Wernick, 1991). Finally, our Special Issue closes with an unusual contribution from Catalonia (Spain). Xifra explores the phenomenon of ‘civil religion’ through an exploration of the Barcelona Football Club (Barc¸a). He suggests that Barc¸a uses a form of devotional-promotional communication identified as a special form of public relations by Tilson (2006) in the context of religion. In this Xifra explores issues of national identity (Catalonia is a ‘stateless nation’), the centrality of sport (and Barc¸a – ‘more than a club’) and its role as a civil religion in which the media plays a crucial symbolic and communicative role. Xifra draws out the ritualistic cultishness generated by Barc¸a that helps to recreate the national community. He also provides substantial empirical evidence that demonstrates the role of public relations as a media source, and as a production house with its own media, that reinforces the religiosity of the brand and enhances relationships with mass publics. We hope that this Special Issue has gone beyond the opening up of a relatively untouched subject, and that it in some way acts as a catalyst to stimulate interest in various dimensions of culture such as tourism and religion. The issue clearly demonstrates that public relations research can be usefully divergent, and not restricted to limited organizational perspectives and restricted vocabularies. The conversations in the public relations discipline can yet be broadened. References Anderson, W. B. (2001). Does the cheerleading ever stop? Major league baseball and sport promotion. Journalism and Mass Communication Quarterly, 78, 355–382. Anderson, W. B. (2006). American v. national football league: using public relations to “win” war against a monopoly. Public Relations Review, 32(1), 53–57. Curtin, P., & Gaither, T. K. (2005). International public relations: Negotiating culture, identity and power. London: Sage. Hodges, C. (2006). “PRP culture”: a framework for exploring public relations practitioners as cultural intermediaries. Journal of Communication Management, 10(1), 80–93. Hopwood, M. (2005a). Sports public relations: The strategic application of public relations to the business of sport. In B. G. Pitts (Ed.), Where sport marketing theory meets practice: Selected papers from the second annual conference of the sport marketing association. Morgantown, WV: Fitness Information Technology. Hopwood, M. (2005b). Public relations in English county cricket. Corporate Communications: an International Journal, 10(3), 201–212. Hopwood, M. (2005c). Applying the public relations function to the business of sport. International Journal of Sports Marketing and Sponsorship, 6(3), 174–188. Hopwood, M. (2007). The sports integrated marketing communications mix, sports public relations. In S. Chadwick & J. Beech (Eds.), The marketing of sport. London: FTPH. Hopwood, M., & Edwards, A. (in press). The game we love. Evolved. In S. Chadwick & D. Arthur (Eds.), International cases in the business of sport. Oxford: Butterworth-Heinemann. Irwin, R. L., Sutton, W. A., & McCarthy, L. M. (2002). Sport promotion and sales management. Champaign, IL: Human Kinetics. L’Etang, J. (2006a). Public relations in sport, health and tourism. In J. L’Etang & M. Pieczka (Eds.), Public relations: Critical debates and contemporary practice. Mahwah, New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. L’Etang, J. (2006b). Public relations and sport in promotional culture. Public Relations Review, 32(4), 386–394. L’Etang, J., Falkheimer, J., & Lugo, J. (2007). Public relations and tourism: Critical reflections and an international research agenda. Public Relations Review, 33(1), 68–76. Mullin, B. J., Hardy, S., & Sutton, W. A. (2007). Sport Marketing 3/e. Champaign, IL: Human Kinetics. Nixon, S., & du Gay, P. (2002). Who needs cultural intermediaries? Cultural studies, 16(4), 495–500. Neupauer, N. (2001). Sports information directing: A plea for helping an unknown field. In R. Heath (Ed.), Handbook of public relations. Thousand Oaks: Sage. Nichols, W., Moynahan, P., Hall, A., & Taylor, J. (2002). Media relations in sport. Fitness Information Technology. Parks, J. B., Quarterman, J., & Thibault, L. (Eds.). (2007). Contemporary sport management 3/e. Champaign, IL: Human Kinetics. Pedersen, P. M., Miloch, K. S., & Laucella, P. C. (2007). Strategic sport communication. Champaign, IL: Human Kinetics. Pieczka, M. (1999). Call for papers. Stirling Media Research Institute Roundtable. Stoldt, G. C., Dittmore, S. W., & Branvold, S. E. (2006). Sport public relations: Managing organisational communication. Champaign, IL: Human Kinetics. Tilson, D. (2006). Devotional-promotional communication and Santiago: a thousand year campaign for St James and Spain. In J. L’Etang & M. Pieczka (Eds.), Public relations: Critical debates and contemporary practice. Mahwah, New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Wernick, A. (1991). Promotional culture: Advertising ideology and symbolic expression. London: Sage.

Jacquie L’Etang Stirling Media Research Institute (SMRI), Scotland Maria Hopwood Bond University, Australia...