Identifying the components of innovative marketing strategies in the sports industry with foundational data theory

Objective: The sports industry, as one of the fastest-growing and most important industries in different societies, has always received a lot of attention. In this industry, it is necessary to use innovative marketing strategies to attract new customers, retain old customers, and increase sales. In this regard, identifying the components of innovative marketing strategies in the sports industry has been considered one of the important issues in the field of marketing. In this article, using foundation data theory, important and influential components in innovative marketing strategies in the sports industry were identified and investigated. Following the presentation of the obtained results, suggestions were made for the development of innovative marketing strategies in the sports industry.

Method: The current research method is based on data theory to collect the required data from library studies and semi-structured and in-depth interviews, to identify the relevant components, the general framework of the model was used based on the foundation's data theory approach with the constructionist approach of Charmez. (2014) was used. The statistical population included senior sports managers, sports product manufacturers, sports industry experts, and sports management professors. Sampling was done purposefully by successive sampling (15 people). Lincoln and Gaba's (1985) evaluation criteria were used to check the quality and accreditation of the qualitative results, including the criteria of validity, transferability, reliability, and verifiability. The interviews were coded using MAXQDA software. In this research, to calculate the retest reliability, 3 interviews were randomly selected from among the interviews. Each was coded twice in a 30-day (one-month) interval by the researcher. The reliability rate was 0.89, which was confirmed and acceptable.

Findings: The findings showed the effective factors on innovative marketing strategies in the sports industry, including opportunism and value (4 indicators: value creation, innovative market development, innovative market discovery, opportunism), marketing variables (4 indicators: product/product promotion, innovative promotion, pricing, innovative product distribution), customer focus (3 indicators: customer satisfaction, customer orientation, innovative channels), integrated marketing (2 indicators: market focus, marketing influence), unique position Person (2 indicators: orientation quality, change, and improvement), positive mental image (2 indicators: networking, good reputation in the market), marketing strategy and planning (2 indicators: marketing planning, marketing strategy), innovative market research (2 Index: source of innovative research, innovative market analysis).

Conclusion: The findings of this research provide new knowledge and insight into the development of innovative marketing strategies in the sports industry. Specifically, two factors of "opportunism and value creation" and "customer focus" were identified as key and influential factors in innovative marketing strategies in the sports industry that have received less attention in previous literature. Therefore, the results of this study can contribute to the development of more effective approaches in the field of innovative marketing strategies in the sports industry