Sport Events in a City – The Residents’ Choice

City marketing focuses on the use of marking tools with a customer-orientated philosophy for creating, communicating, delivering and exchanging urban offerings that have value for its citizens. City marketing can be described as a long term plan which includes various related activities that are aimed at the attraction and retention of specific target groups of people for a city. Sport has become an identity for many nations in the world. There are three benefits of branding a city through sports events. Firstly, sports are the easiest events to market and promote as the audience is large. Secondly, sports epitomise the human spirit of survival and competitiveness and as a result, spectators cannot help but be engrossed in the match or event. Thirdly, sports events enable a city’s image to be displayed to audiences watching the event, whether it is live or through a secondary medium. Media coverage is predominantly free and the benefits can generate a visibility that attracts residents, tourism and investment to the city. The objective of this study was to determine which sport events the residents of Nelson Mandela Bay (NMB), South Africa would support. This exploratory study used an on-line questionnaire and convenience and snowball sampling methods. There were 952 responses from the population of NMB, including Port Elizabeth in South Africa. The results indicated that sporting events create job opportunities and that sporting events such as cricket and rugby are supported by all residents and sporting events such as Ironman can be leveraged to increase tourism