Identification of Policymaking Challenges in Sports Celebrities Endorsement Advertising in Iran

Policymaking advertising is one of the important duties of public institutes and organizations such as ministries for their sub-organizations. In spite of this necessity, Sports celebrity endorsement advertising in Iran lacks policymaking. Therefore, the current research is to investigate policymaking challenges of sports celebrity endorsement advertising in Iran in the sociological, managerial and political-economic areas. Considering research objective, this is a developmental study and regarding research methodology, it was a qualitative one conducted using theme analysis. The research statistical population consisted of specialists of sports law, advertising, policymaking and sport management and marketing with an unknown volume. Using purposeful sampling method, 15 experts participated to the semi-structured, in-depth interview, and the process of analysis came to an end with theoretical saturation criterion. The quality of findings was also verified by recoding some of data. The set of conducted encodings together with a mass of notes taken by researchers showed that the policymaking challenges of sports celebrity endorsement advertising in Iran are of three types: managerial challenges, sociological challenges, and political-economic challenges. Managerial challenges include cognitive weaknesses and system weaknesses. Considering the identified challenges in this research, policies of sports celebrity endorsement advertising in Iran can be formulated.