IOC Marketing Media Guide Paris 2024 : Discourse analysis

Abstract

The Olympic and Paralympic Games represent the world’s most significant sporting event, bringing together not only professional athletes but also other stakeholders of the Olympic Movement, with the aim of transmitting Olympic values globally. The International Olympic Committee (IOC), a non-profit organization responsible for organizing the Games, primarily relies on its marketing resources and The Olympic Partners (TOP) programme to ensure the smooth execution of its activities.

           Through discourse and lexical analysis, this article examines the IOC’s document, IOC Marketing: Media Guide. Paris 2024, to understand (1) how the text fits the discursive universe in terms of genres and the “scene of enunciation” theory (Maingueneau, 1998) and (2) analyze the legitimization processes of partnerships with companies from diverse sectors of activity. The analytical results reveal that the IOC’s discourse is predominantly displayed within an institutional and formal “enclosing scene”, following the norms of an informative and explanatory “generic scene”, with the primary objective of providing useful information to media representatives. Nevertheless, the third section, "Olympic Partnerships," adheres more closely to an argumentative “generic scene”, relying on linguistics strategies of argumentation to justify the global companies’ involvement in the Olympic Games. Furthermore, the use of Iramuteq software reveals the vocabulary derived from this discourse and its relation in the “lexical world”. The analysis brings to light the diverse discursive strategies employed by the IOC and its global partner companies to legitimize their roles in the Olympic Games through their identification with Olympic values and social engagement.