Agency Dark Horses Publishes ‘7 Deadly Sins Of Marketing Women’s Sport’ Paper

Days ahead of the start of the UEFA women’s Euro 2022 football tournament, sport and entertainment agency Dark Horses published a paper outlining its perspective and advice on how to market women’s sports by spotlighting seven damaging marketing techniques.

Titled ‘The 7 Deadly Sins of Marketing Women’s Sport’ and structured to echo the biblical vices of Christian teaching, the white paper outlines the tactical mistakes marketers regular fall into when activated around women’s sport and also delivers a set of positive insights into how these can be rectified and acts as a practical guide to identifying the challenges and successfully promoting the rise of women’s sport.

The paper reveals seven ways current marketing techniques are damaging the growth of women’s sport, while suggesting how it can be done right. The 7 sins cited in the agency report are:

> Charity

> Prophecy

> Servitude

> Unity

> Chastity

> Penury

> Lust

The agency’s advice and opinion is that while these approaches have in the past been successful tactics in marketing men’s sport the landscape is changing. It also warns against brands simply using women’s sports to make vague umbrella statements about their own values or as a diversity and inclusion box ticking exercise.

Marketers can check out the agency’s white paper here and Dark Horses promoted the initiative through a PR and social campaign across its own platforms.

Charity, prophecy, servitude, unity, chastity, penury and lust.@creativemoment_ looks at Dark Horses' paper on The 7 Deadly Sins of Marketing Women's Sport and how some practices are doing more harm than good. https://t.co/wukclrT3Pb

— Dark Horses (@darkhorsesldn) June 30, 2022

“We care enormously about women’s sport and genuinely believe that marketing will be instrumental in helping achieve parity with men’s. Parity in support, passion, fandom, money and beyond,” explained Dark Horses CEO Melissa Robertson in the launch promotion. “We are storytellers first and foremost, and we felt compelled to write this paper to provide some (perhaps heretical) thoughts on the traps we believe that the media, marketers and initiatives can sometimes fall into. Hero-ing female athletes, or sponsoring female events should not be a D&I box-ticking exercise or a package add-on, it should be an opportunity to tell even better stories. So let’s start doing it.”

“These are the seven deadly sins of marketing women’s sport. Seven common traps that are marketers can easily fall into,” continued Robertson. “But they also point us in the direction we need to go in if we’re serious about achieving parity. Never underestimate the power of marketing and storytelling in achieving this because we’re going to need all our collective creative firepower to get there.”

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Plus, check out what, in our opinion, is a women’s sport’s marketing masterclass from Nike in the form of a trio of UEFA Euro 2022 campaigns: ‘Never Follow, Never Settle‘, ‘You’ve Never Seen England Like This‘ and ‘Rebel Girls‘.