China and Beijing 2008 and 2022 Olympic Games: the strategic role of marketing and the use of social media

Abstract

In China, sporting activity is considered very important for the entire school career of each student, and in recent years, both Olympic success and participation have received equal attention. In the past decades, the country has tried to concentrate all its resources on sports education, to train athletes who can compete for their nation in the most significant international competitions, and the impressive economic growth that the country has experienced coincided with this period. The Olympics are therefore a crucial component for a nation's development, not just from a sporting perspective but also from a social, economic, and environmental one. The purpose of this thesis is to analyze the two different Olympic editions that the city of Beijing hosted in 2008 and 2022, respectively, as well as to examine how the importance of marketing and the role of digitalization used for the promotion of the Games have changed and developed over the years. Keeping up with technology is essential in a world that is constantly evolving. Marketing and digitalization have turned out to be two fundamental and very powerful tools that have allowed the Beijing Olympic Games to have a diffusion like never before. The objective of this thesis is to examine how China prepared itself to host an event of this caliber, and to understand how much this sporting event had a key role in the development and economic progress of the country, as well as to examine how technological advancement and social media have transformed how an Olympics can be experienced. Social media and marketing initiatives turned out to be what allowed the country to face a challenging task such as organizing an international sporting event, especially in 2022 with the presence of the Covid-19 pandemic which made everything more complicated and required enormous adaptation efforts.