Barriers to Iranian Women's Professional Sports Marketing

The importance of womens sports and the development of their participations in national and international events, attention to sports marketing as the most important tools in attracting sponsors seems necessary. The purpose of this study was to identify barriers to professional sport marketing in Iranian women athletes. The applied research was carried out using qualitative method based on Grounded theory. Semi-structured interview was used to collect the data. The statistical population of the study consisted of sport’s managers and sport’s experts in Iran. Sample size in this approach during research is determined in which 14 interviews were conducted. For the three steps of encoding and analyzing the data, Max Q da Pro 12.3 software was used. 100 open cods and 11 axial codes were identified. At the end, 6 categories of barriers were named; social- cultural barriers, governmental thought, Legal-law and customary barriers, Administrative and organizational barriers, media and the weakness in the marketing system leads to sport. The finding suggested that it is necessary to use modern marketing strategies in sport federations that are appropriate to Iranian womens professional sport environment.