Olympic Marketing

'The book starts with a foreword from Thierry Zintz, the MEMOS director, followed with a Preface written by Richard Pound, the former Chairman of the IOC Marketing Commission, then followed by a section named ‘Executive Perspective’ where Lisa Baird, the Chief Marketing Officer of the United States Olympic Committee, draws a picture of the situation and challenges faced by the United States Olympic Committee in terms of marketing. The book then continues with the core contents of the book structured around eight chapters, preceded by a general introduction and followed by a general conclusion. This progressive entrance into the topic clearly highlights the authors’ will to fully integrate their book and contents within current marketing issues and practices which is laudable, and within the fact that Olympic organisations’ managers and practitioners are in need for more marketing knowledge, analysis, framework and examples of good practice.Overall, Olympic Marketing represents a ‘must have’ for all Olympic marketing researchers and practitioners because it relies on strong theoretical foundations but also because these specific and up-to-date marketing approaches and orientations are very well applied to practical Olympic cases and recent examples. The authors also provide a framework and propositions which are very useful for practitioners. Because of these two components, this book is also highly relevant for students and research students interested in the topic. Moreover, considering the theoretical bases of the framework the authors propose, it can even be extended to sport contexts involving multiple stakeholders which are probably the reality for a majority of sport organisations. Consequently, this book will be of interest of many sport marketers in particularly those interested in major sporting events such as World Cups, Asian Games or Commonwealth Games. It is well illustrated, well supported by references and examples, and is logically structured and presented. As previously mentioned, the main weakness concerns the assessment criteria regarding the cases of good marketing practice and the selection of cases which are seen to be, intentionally or unintentionally, reflective of relevant marketing approaches and programmes. However, this shortcoming does not strongly limit the contributions and the significance of the book. The second limitation concerns the tension/negotiation issue due to conflicting stakeholders’ objectives which is discussed in the conclusion but could have received more attention. On a more anecdotal note, the cover of the book could have been more appealing to the readers, but after having read the book, it appears clear that the tough Olympic rights protection strategies may have prevented the authors to use attractive Olympic-related pictures.' Guillaume Baudet, Loughborough University, UK