47

This article presents a conceptual and functional point of view the potential contribution of a geomarketing approach for research on sports services. This involves not just a straightforward collusion between geography and marketing, but primarily a decision-making phase, a key element for allowing expansion of sports activities. Although its methods borrow much from spatial analysis and geomatics, and are in keeping with a structuralist perspective, the interest of geomarketing is in no way restricted to market research, nor to the mapping of clients or prospects within catchment areas. It means going beyond the idea of using only spatial representation of the data for integrating the geographical dimension into the marketing strategy. This integration pushes towards a more systematic perspective using marketing as a model for analysing sports services for which practitioners' or consumers' choices have become predominant. After putting research into the geography of sport back into its scientific context, a definition of geomarketing is proposed, with stress made on the specificity of sports services. Three broad fields of operation are then defined as avenues of study which combine the expectations of the actors with new geographical perspectives.