Research On Olympic Marketing Strategy Of The Portals’

Under the Olympic motto that “Faster, Higher, and Stronger”, the modern Olympicgames has become the largest sporting event in human history, and also an opportunityfor the enterprises to carry out the Olympic marketing. In the2008Beijing OlympicGames, Sohu became the first Internet content services sponsor in the Olympic history,and this means the arrival of the new media era for the Olympic marketing.(Unlessspecified, all “Olympics” mentioned in this study means the summer Olympic Games).Internet companies exist both as a form of new media, and also the carrier of it.Therefore, the portals’ Olympic marketing both has the characteristics of the Internetenterprises and the marketing attributes of the media products, but also has its ownunique marketing characteristics of the new media.Four years later, the London Olympics is coming, the communication environmentthat bring out multi-terminal, fragmentation, personalization, and socialization makespeople get information more diversified, and the live TV coverage that relies onmonopoly rights to broadcast is under unprecedented challenges, the internet andmobile phones and other new media develop rapidly outside the traditional media.Before the London Olympic Games, Sina, Tencent, Sohu, Netease—the four majorportals had announced their Olympic strategy in succession, and through Weibo andother social media, it was the first time to realize the “real-time interaction” betweennetizens and the athletes, and also the media platform. The rise of “social marketing”brings the Olympic marketing into the new era.First of all, this study will trace the history of the modern Olympic Games whichcombined with mass media, in order to discuss the changes of London Olympicmarketing environment in new media era, and then, I’ll combine the characteristics ofthe network media to analyze its Olympic marketing value. After describing the LondonOlympic strategy of the four largest domestic portals, this study proposes a new patternof Olympic marketing for the portals, namely the portals’“Weibo+Video+Mobile”mode. Then, I’ll analyze their marketing effects from multiple dimensions, such as theadvertising investment, earnings, user participation, and so on. According to the abovematerials, the study puts forward to the deficiencies and defects in Olympic marketing.Finally, the paper proposes post-Olympic differentiation competition strategy of theportals, after considering the major portals’ enterprise background, their resources, the performance during London Olympics, etc, such as the Weibo’s commercializedoperation of Sina, the one-step marketing based on QQ of Tencent, the “three-in-hand”of video strategy of Sohu, and the APP product portfolio matrix distribution on mobileinternet of Netease.