Olympism & Olympic marketing

Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) is ‘a balanced approach for organisations to address economic, social and environmental issues in a way that aims to benefit people, communities and society’ (International Organization for Standardization, 2003). Currently most of the professional sport organisations and athletes have foundations to support social causes. It seems that CSR has become an integral part of sport organisations and its marketing programmes (Babiak & Wolfe, 2006). Sport has the unique position to influence society and communities because sport organisations, by its nature, have the potential to be far more integrated into society, in contrast to commercial business organisations (Smith & Westerbeek, 2007). The research question of this thesis is: should the IOC adopt Olympism as a CSR strategy in order to create a balance between the Olympic philosophy and the Olympic billion dollar business?