The 7 sins of women’s sports marketing: charity, prophecy, servitude, unity, chastity, penury and lust

Dark Horses has created a paper outlining seven ways current marketing techniques are actually damaging women’s sport.

The 7 Deadly Sins of Marketing Women’s Sport outlines the pitfalls businesses fall into while delivering insights into how they can be rectified in the future.

It’s curated to be a practical guide that identifies the challenges of promoting women’s sport.

The 7 sins are charity, prophecy, servitude, unity, chastity, penury, and lust.

The overall take-out is that while there are tried and tested methods of marketing men's sports, these are being changed or ignored when it comes to women’s sports as brands use the game to either make a bigger statement about themselves or tick a D&I box.

Melissa Robertson, CEO of Dark Horses, said: "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.

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. 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.”

Read the full paper here.