Welcome to the beginning of this blog, which I hope will provide you with some interesting takes on how the sport of hockey is being marketed, to both North American, and International markets. I have started this blog because, I have a passion for sports marketing from when I attended university and studied the academic side of this field, and also because I love hockey and find the way it is distributed and marketed to be both interesting as a mass market, and niche sport.
Hockey was not a sport that I was brought up with, I am from the UK, so my awareness of the sport as a child was minimal. I guess the first real contact I had with the sport, was when I was bought a copy of NHL 2003, and I found it hugely entertaining to hit players down to the ice and score a hell of a lot of goals (on easy mode). This basic knowledge, given to me by EA Sports, was all I had until I was 19 and left my homeland for the summer, to work at a summer camp in New York.
When I got there I was working with fellow students from many different countries, but on the first night I was introduced to a group of girls, all wearing the same t-shirt with a strange logo that had a C with an H inside it. Now thats really the start of my love for hockey began, I learned from the four Canadian girls I met, that this was the logo of the Montreal Canadiens, and I heard stories about this storied team and the city that is their home. The rest they say is history and I now live in Montreal, have fallen in love with hockey and try to immerse myself in the sport as much as I possibly can.
At this current point in time, I believe marketing in hockey is at a unique and extremely interesting position. The greatest player in the NHL right now is currently out due to injury, an injury that has changed the way this sport is viewed and interpreted, from NHL arenas, right down to parents taking their children out onto the ice for the very first time.
Around the world hockey is growing as a sport. The NHL showcases itself by sending teams out to Scandinavia and Eastern Europe at the beginning of the year, and the KHL is expanding into new nations across Europe.
Alex Ovechkin switched brands in the off season. The personalities of the NHL are coming out more and more thanks to enhanced media coverage, the multitude of blogs out there and the use of twitter. All of these things and more, are out there for marketers to take advantage of and in some cases trip up on.
I intend to use this blog to identify how the major hockey leagues, teams and brands market their product to consumers, loosely bringing about the name for this blog "Going Shelf".
I hope that you enjoy my thoughts on the posts I put up on this blog. Feel free to comment and send me any feedback.
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