The National Sports Forum

There are few real "trade associations" in sports marketing the way we know they exist in other industries.  The National Sports Forum is a group which exists as a loose association for much of the year, but which comes together annually at rotating sties for a cross-gathering of executives from a variety of different aspects of sports business, including agencies, marketers, promoters, salesmen and event/entertainment hosts.  Once a year for the last 17 years, the Forum has met for three days of what the industry calls "best practices" -- sharing the best and most successful ideas from a variety of different sports, teams, venues and events through guest speakers, panels, breakout sessions and social time.  The idea behind the Forum is that great ideas come from other great ideas.  That is, people in the sports business and sports marketing industry need to hear ideas that have worked for other organizations and then alter them based on what they know about their own organizations to make them work for their own organizations.  The Forum also hosts a Case Cup each year.  Prior to the start of the conference, teams of Sports Business Master's degree students compete in a competition to resolve a marketing problem in a case study.  Last year, the Cup was won by a team from Ohio University.

I like to joke that what in many other industries, including academia, is considered to be plagiarism, we in sports marketing like to call "best practices".  At the Forum, however, these practices are not winked at but embraced.  That's significant, because from a business perspective sports makes for odd bedfellows.  At one level, a basketball team from Chicago competes with a basketball team from Detroit, but their mutual business success is good for the health of their league, the NBA.  At a similar level, a hockey team in Boston competes for the sports entertainment dollar with the baseball team from Boston, but they help each other celebrate their championships.  And in the NFL, because of revenue sharing, everybody both competes with everybody on and off the field and embraces everybody on and off the field as partners. And the bedfellows don't just share beds across cities and sports, but across aspects of the industry as well.  At the Forum, you'll see marketers and corporate sponsors and team executives, people who often find themselves on opposite sides of the negotiating table from each other, sharing ideas, experience and wisdom.

People talk about the importance of networking as career enhancement -- for the individual win.  At the National Sports Forum, networking is done not for the win, but for the win-win, to find paths for sponsors, franchises, manufacturers to all get the most out of their mutual partnerships and for agencies to help show them the way.

References:

(n.d.). Retrieved from sports-forum.com
(n.d.). Retrieved from vimeo.com
Louisville to host 2011 national sports forum. (2009, November 21). Retrieved from bizjournals.com/louisville