Real and virtual sport events in marketing industrial products

In the contemporary competitive context, to acquire a market space sustainable in terms of profitability, companies try to involve consumers in a cognitive, sensorial and affective way (Resciniti, 2004) offering consumption “experiences” able to entertain and to make feeling the consumer an active protagonist of “unique occasions”. Although are mainly commercial and distribution companies to be oriented toward an experiential marketing approach, even industrial firms can enrich their products by offering an entertainment experience. Specially sport, by being a service activity (Zagnoli, Radicchi, 2008), combined with the experimentation of industrial products (e.g. clothes, equipment, beverage, pc, etc.), allows companies to diversify their offer, change their brand’s image, focus on specific target segments and so on. Among the possible relations between marketing and sport, this paper focuses on how industrial companies (sport products and equipments suppliers, multimedia companies and service providers, consumer goods manufacturers, etc.) combine sport with their products and brands “staging” experiential events. The sport occasions are manifold and can assume different nature (real, multimedia, virtual, hyper real, hybrid) related to: - the evolution of technological paradigms that can have different application depending on the cultural approach, the level of infrastructural equipment and of technological literacy diffused in a specific context; - the strategic choices implemented by the companies which in turn are influenced by several variables (consumers’ target, product type, companies’ core business, level of competition, accessibility to the technology, etc). In the light of the empirical research several ways of combining sport to the use of industrial products emerged. We found many events in which the sport theme (practiced, viewed, diffused through the new technologies, lived within a specific place - flagship store, theme park, 3D environment, etc.) hauls the experimentation of the product that the company wants to promote. Since the increasing diffusion of new multimedia and interactive technologies at global level, companies often adopt experiential marketing strategies aimed to the ideation and implementation of sport events that intend not only to enhance a direct consumers’ involvement, but also a “mediate participation” up to offer a sport virtual representation. Multimedia and interactive opportunities granted by the new media induce industrial companies to stage real sport events enriched with multimedia value added services aimed to maximize the user’s involvement and co-participation as well as to diversify their own incomes, arriving in some cases particularly structured to offer a virtual representation of the sport event. Therefore the events differ not only for their complexity level - rather variegated in terms of human, organizational, technological, infrastructural, financial, etc. required resources, but also for the feature of the event (from real events to hybrid forms, up to virtual events) that answers to specific strategic choices implemented by each company.