The growing field of sports marketing and entertainment management is the focus of a new night school programme aimed at Hong Kong professionals.
The Centre for Sports Marketing and Entertainment Management is a 10-week course which has been introduced to upgrade the overall professionalism of the industry through specialist training.
Steven Feuerstein, a regional sport impresario who promoted the recent Perrier Hong Kong Open golf tournament through his company Sports International, said he had been developing the centre for four years to bring experienced people to an industry which was still in its infancy in Asia.
The school, which is just one part of the centre, provides strategic consulting services and 'below-the-line' advisory services, topic-specific seminars and custom-designed corporate workshops.
Its primary focus is sponsorship, the life-blood of the industry. Despite dwindling tobacco sponsorship worldwide, it is estimated more than US$17 billion was invested in sponsorship of events in the US last year. In Asia, it is considerably less but still a multi-billion-dollar industry.
Mr Feuerstein said there were no traditional sponsors. The vast majority had product lines which had nothing to do with entertainment or sport. The only common ground was that their target market should have a passion for whatever they were sponsoring, be it music, a conference or a sporting event. 'Our job is to find out what has value for the client. In the past, the industry gained a reputation for trying to provide easy benefits which appeared to be substantial but, frankly, were not,' he said.