Abstract
Event marketing, both in the sense of using events as a marketing technique and the marketing of events, has been subject to considerable attention over the past two decades (e.g. Cunningham and Taylor 1995; Hoyle 2002; Getz 2008). But the phenomenon itself is of course much older (Zauhar 2003). In this proposed paper, we offer an empirical study of event marketing as practised a century ago. More specifically, we describe the marketing of the Olympic Games in Stockholm, 1912. The study is based on the archive of the Organizing Committee for the games, including its subcommittee for advertising. The material consists of the official report from the games, the minutes of meeting of the various bodies, including proposals and supporting documents, incoming and outgoing correspondence, official communications from the Organizing Committee, printed matters, newspaper clippings, etc. This rich material allows us to trace the various efforts made to market the games in detail. The study seeks to enrich our understanding of marketing as an area of expertise, which has recently attracted increasing scholarly attention, not least within the IMP community (Araujo et al 2010; Zwick and Cayla 2011; Hagberg and Kjellberg 2010; Barrey et al. 2000; Geiger and Finch 2009; Simakova and Neyland 2008). The event under study predates the emergence of the marketing discipline (Shaw and Jones 2005) and the archive material does not suggest that the actors involved ever considered what they were doing to be ―marketing‖. Rather, they were creating publicity for the Olympic Games. One may thus question whether the games actually were ‗marketed‘.1 On the other hand, the publicity dimension appears to be central to lay-understandings of marketing even today. Further, if we look at the concrete practices that the involved actors engaged in, these bear much resemblance with what we would expect contemporary event marketers to engage in, i.e. contemplating event stake-holder management, partnerships and collaboration (Getz et al. 2007), image-enhancement potential 1 At roughly the same time the planning started for the Olympic games in Stockholm, the first university courses in Marketing were developed in the US. The first books and articles on the subject that employed the term ‗marketing‘ were also published during the following decade (e.g. Weld 1916, 1917; Duncan 1920; Ivey 1921) of events and their media coverage and how this might generate induced demand for e.g. a destination (Smith 2005), co-branding events and destinations (Chalip and Costa 2006), the leveraging of events for additional benefits (O'Brien 2006), and to the goal of generating a lasting event legacy (Ritchie 2000). We suggest that by adopting a pragmatic approach, those who engage in (what we now consider to be) marketing are led to deal with certain task-related issues that remain more or less the same over time. The precise manner in which they attend to these issues, however, may differ over time. In the paper, we inquire into how the games were ‗marketed‘? We outline the specific practices involved in marketing the event, including what was done, who were engaged, which techniques were used, which resources were drawn upon, etc. Among other things, this mapping of marketing practices leads us to question the object being marketed: was the committee really marketing the Olympic Games, or were their efforts directed towards some other object, e.g. Sweden? In what ways did the marketing efforts contribute to stabilise this object? What were the organisers seeking to achieve through their ‗marketing‘ efforts? Here we seek to establish the ideas underpinning the observed practices. The activities related to the official poster for the games are particularly interesting. The Organizing Committee was able to reach a decision on the design of the poster only after a prolonged process, in which two distinctly different values were contrasted (artistic merit vs. publicity effect). Second, the reception of the poster varied across countries around the world (perceived as artistic by some and obscene by others, explicitly banned in certain countries, etc.).