Swatch Group's Sports Marketing Strategy

Since late 1970s and early 1980s, sports has gradually transformed from overall institutional management to industrial involvement in the recent 30 years, which is regarded as the most potential "sunrise industry" in the 21^st century. With the participation into the market, sports games are introduced with more and more commercial operations, which make sports marketing being a new communication method in the field of marketing that appeal to the companies as a kind of special media. A lot of companies are attracted and married with sports marketing as a platform that connecting products, brand image and value, thus creating huge profits.SWATCHGROUP, the Swiss giant watch industrial Group, boasting the unique sports marketing when involved in the sports, who has been a long time witness and active participation in sports history in nearly one century. OMEGA, one of its luxury brands, has been the official time keeper of Olympics for 23 times. Many other brands, such as Longines, Rado, Tissot and Swatch also contribute tremendous efforts in sports field. Sports marketing become the particular and significant aspects in their brands strategy, which provide the solid safeguard and promotion to the market shares and brand value.Based on the standpoint of a big company with multi-brand strategies, the paper, analyze the current situation of sports marketing and summarize the purpose of company's entry into sports marketing with its advantages and disadvantages. Following the above mentioned theory and according to the recent watch industry status in China, the characteristics of watch industry and its consumers are explained. And then the sports marketing for OMEGA, Tissot and Swatch, the three representative brands under the SWATCHGROUP is deeply studied and analyzed. Finally, assessment of multi-brand strategy of SWATCHGROUP in sports marketing with its strengths and weaknesses in the brand portfolio is given. Mixing all the above mentioned study, an integrated strategy is proposed that how SWATCHGROUP should do in its sports marketing to meet the needs of enhancement of brands value and optimize the group image. And hope it can be the enlightening reference to a multi-brand company when doing sports marketing, especially for those Chinese companies targeted overseas.