Providing a Marketing Influence Network through Influencers in Sports Tourism Promotion

Subject Areas : Sport Sciences Quarterly

zahra vakili ghahani ¹ , mahvash noorbakhsh ² , Abbas Khodayari ³ , پریوش نوربخش ⁴

1 -
2 - Professor of Sports Management Department, Karaj Branch, Islamic Azad University, Karaj, Iran
3 - Karaj Islamic Azad university
4 - مدرس دانشگاه ازاد واحد کرج

Received: 2024-06-29 Accepted : 2024-08-16 Published : 2025-05-18

Keywords: Digital influencers, Influencer marketing, Social media, Sports tourism, Thematic analysis.,

Abstract :

The purpose of this study was to provide a marketing influence network through influencers in the promotion of sports tourism. The research method employed was qualitative, utilizing a thematic analysis approach. The participants in this study consisted of sports tourism stakeholders. The sampling method was purposive, employing a snowball strategy, and a total of 15 interviews were conducted. Data collection was carried out through semi-structured interviews, and the credibility and reliability of the results were assessed using strategies such as credibility, transferability, confirmability, and audit trail. Data analysis was conducted using thematic analysis based on the proposed framework by Braun and Clarke (2006). From the analysis of the conducted interviews, 57 core themes, 12 organizational themes, and 6 pervasive themes emerged, including performance expectations, facilitating conditions, perceived benefits, influence and arousal, effective audience engagement, and audience inclination towards influencers. These findings indicate that marketing through influencers in sports tourism promotion is a process that begins with facilitating conditions and culminates in audience inclination towards influencers.

References:

احمدی، م.، چراغی، م.، و محمدی، ر. (1403). مؤلفه‌های بازاریابی تأثیرگذار بر تصویر از مقصد گردشگری (مطالعه موردی: گردشگران گنبد سلطانیه، استان زنجان). پژوهش¬های بازاریابی گردشگری و میهمان¬نوازی، 1(1)، 18-1.
ذهبی، ث.، اسدی، ع.، و خدایاری، ب. (1402). مطالعه تأثیر سطح درگیری ذهنی مشتری در فرآیند بازاریابی افراد تأثیرگذار بر تمایل به سفر به مقصد، نگرش نسبت به برند و تمایل به خرید. مدیریت بازاریابی، 18(59)، 19-1.
موقر، م.، و کاظمی سراسکانرود، ز. (1402). شناسایی مولفه‌های تعیین‌کننده ارزش‌آفرینی بازاریابی از طریق افراد تأثیرگذار برای کسب و کارها با رویکرد تحلیل مضمون. مطالعات رسانه¬های نوین، 9(33)، 390-363.
Archer, C., & Harrigan, P. (2016). Show me the money: How bloggers as stakeholders are challenging theories of relationship building in public relations. Media International Australia, 160(1), 67-77.
Balaban, D., & Mustățea, M. (2019). Users’ perspective on the credibility of social media influencers in Romania and Germany. Romanian Journal of Communication and Public Relations, 21(1), 31-46.
Brovina, F., & Sallaku, D. (2024). Sports Tourism in Albania: A Critical Review. Migration Letters, 21(S1), 675-683.
Daniel Jr, E. S., Crawford Jackson, E. C., & Westerman, D. K. (2018). The influence of social media influencers: Understanding online vaping communities and parasocial interaction through the lens of Taylor’s six-segment strategy wheel. Journal of Interactive Advertising, 18(2), 96-109.
Femenia-Serra, F., & Gretzel, U. (2020). Influencer marketing for tourism destinations: Lessons from a mature destination. In Information and Communication Technologies in Tourism 2020: Proceedings of the International Conference in Surrey, United Kingdom, January 08–10, 2020 (pp. 65-78). Springer International Publishing.
Florenthal, B. (2019). Young consumers’ motivational drivers of brand engagement behavior on social media sites: A synthesized U&G and TAM framework. Journal of Research in Interactive Marketing, 13(3), 351-391.
Freeman, R. E. (2010). Strategic management: A stakeholder approach. Cambridge university press.
Hernández-Méndez, J., & Baute-Díaz, N. (2024). Influencer marketing in the promotion of tourist destinations: mega, macro and micro-influencers. Current Issues in Tourism, 27(8), 1332-1342.
Hudders, L., & Lou, C. (2023). The rosy world of influencer marketing? Its bright and dark sides, and future research recommendations. International Journal of Advertising, 42(1), 151-161.
John, S. P., & Supramaniam, S. (2023). Antecedents and Effects of Influencer Marketing Strategies: A Systematic Literature Review and Directions for Future Research. In Digital Marketing & eCommerce Conference (pp. 113-119). Springer, Cham.
Joshi, Y., Lim, W. M., Jagani, K., & Kumar, S. (2023). Social media influencer marketing: foundations, trends, and ways forward. Electronic Commerce Research, 1-55.
Kay, S., Mulcahy, R., & Parkinson, J. (2020). When less is more: the impact of macro and micro social media influencers’ disclosure. Journal of marketing management, 36(3-4), 248-278.
Kemppainen, S. (2023). Utilization of influencer marketing in sport sponsorship on Instagram (Master's thesis).
Kılıç, İ., Seçilmiş, C., & Özdemir, C. (2024). The role of travel influencers in volunteer tourism: an application of the cognitive response theory. Current Issues in Tourism, 27(2), 200-216.
Kilipiri, E., Papaioannou, E., & Kotzaivazoglou, I. (2023). Social media and influencer marketing for promoting sustainable tourism destinations: The Instagram case. Sustainability, 15(8), 6374.
Lee, J. K. (2021). The effects of team identification on consumer purchase intention in sports influencer marketing: The mediation effect of ad content value moderated by sports influencer credibility. Cogent Business & Management, 8(1), 1957073.
Leung, T., & Chung, F. L. (2014, August). Persuasion driven influence propagation in social networks. In 2014 IEEE/ACM International Conference on Advances in Social Networks Analysis and Mining (ASONAM 2014) (pp. 548-554). IEEE.
Lou, C., & Yuan, S. (2019). Influencer marketing: How message value and credibility affect consumer trust of branded content on social media. Journal of interactive advertising, 19(1), 58-73.
Manthiou, A., Ulrich, I., & Kuppelwieser, V. (2024). The travel influencer construct: An empirical exploration and validation. Tourism Management, 101, 104858.
Melnychuk, H.-A., Arasli, H. & Nevzat, R. (2024), How to engage and attract virtual influencers’ followers: a new non-human approach in the age of influencer marketing. Marketing Intelligence & Planning, Vol. ahead-of-print No. ahead-of-print. https://doi.org/10.1108/MIP-06-2023-0251
Squires, V. (2023). Thematic Analysis. In Varieties of Qualitative Research Methods: Selected Contextual Perspectives (pp. 463-468). Springer.
Statista. (2023, Sep 27). Global influencer marketing value 2016-2023. Diakses dari https://www.statista.com/statistics/1092819/global-influencer-market-size/.
Stewart, K., & Williams, M. (2005). Researching online populations: the use of online focus groups for social research. Qualitative Research, 5(4), 395-416.
Tanwar, A. S., Chaudhry, H., & Srivastava, M. K. (2022). Trends in infl uencer marketing: A review and bibliometric analysis. Journal of Interactive Advertising, 22(1), 1-27.
Vila-López, N., Kuster-Boluda, I., Mora-Pérez, E., & Pascual-Riquelme, I. (2023). A bibliometric analysis of virtual influencers in the Web of Science. Journal of Marketing Analytics, 1-17.
Xu, X., & Pratt, S. (2018). Social media influencers as endorsers to promote travel destinations: an application of self-congruence theory to the Chinese Generation Y. Journal of travel & tourism marketing, 35(7), 958-972.
Zhang, S., Kim, K., Yim, B. H., Hyun, B., & Chai, W. (2022). Destination personality and behavioral intention in Hainan’s Golf tourism during COVID-19 pandemic: Mediating role of destination image and self-congruity. Sustainability, 14(11), 6528.
ZipDo. (2023, July 16). Essential Marketing In Sports Industry Statistics in 2023. Retrieved from https://zipdo.co/statistics/marketing-in-sports-industry/.