The Olympic Games have been studied in various aspects such as event organization, governing structure, and economic impacts of the Games (e.g., Ren, 2006). However, research endeavors to the hosting city of Olympics have been often directed to city development (Essex et al., 1999), city competitiveness (Yu, 2007), and city image (Smith, 2005). Do the Olympic Games really have the effects on city marketing? An investigation seems to be necessary.
Method:
Therefore, the factors of tourism, financial investment, and usage of oversea intelligence become necessary to analyze. The purpose of this study was to explore the changes in tourism, usage of oversea intelligence, and financial investment of Beijing by hosting 2008 Olympic Games. Beijing Olympic Games was used as a typical case to test the effects of Olympic city marketing.
Analysis/Results:
Data of time series concerning related marketing variables were collected from the Beijing Statistical Yearbook (2009) over the years during 1994 to 2008. A comparative analysis was made based on the average annual growth rate in Total Tourism Income, Foreign Direct Investment and Oversea Intelligence before and after the bids to evaluate the specific effects of city marketing of Beijing Olympics. The descriptive statistics of SPSS 17.0 were applied to analyze effects of the Beijing Olympic city marketing, and explore geometric means, average annual growth rates before the Olympic bid and after the Olympic bid in the calendar years. Time series analysis was utilized to analyze the changes in the variables of Tourism (Total Tourism Revenue), Investment (Foreign Direct Investment) and Oversea Intelligence (Non-Sport Intelligence) before and after the bid. The results showed that Beijing City had a remarkable increment in both financial investment and usage of oversea intelligence to host the international events, from 9.26% and 3.88% annual average growth rates before the bid to 19.93% and 28.75 % annual average growth after the bid respectively. While the increase of tourism volume was unable to observe, the annual average total income of Beijing tourism only changed slightly from 12.28% to 13.25% before and after the bid.
Conclusions:
The study demonstrates that Olympic city marketing of Beijing had an overall positive outcome, but did not maximize the benefits by the opportunity of hosing Olympic Games. The findings provide the city administrators with investigative reference when they make strategic decisions in event selection and arrangement.