Dont think table tennis marketing needs too much complex marketing concepts, since the market is pretty niche and most of the consumers that are actively trying to improve their equipment setups have pretty decent knowledge about the products.
As far as I know there aren't much big data involved with the marketing of equipments and i don't think, with the exception of a few companies, have utilized the advanced e-commerce/m-business of today's world. Butterfly and Stiga, as Tony stated, has done very well in their CRM compared to their competitors, which basically have no contacts of any sort with the general consumers (e.g. Nittaku, Yasaka so on and so forth). Social media in this age seem to be one of the dominant platform of sharing informations as well. But obviously it's confined to a fan page and not a banner, thus it still requires the consumer's active search for their pages.
That being said, I dont really see the need of putting these stuff on TV. As I said, from what i've seen thus far, the consumers generally have an acceptable level of knowledge of the products, thus it can be expected of them to know where to look for the stuff, instead of having the need to shove it in their faces on the TV. Look at all the other niche markets, E.g. HiFi systems, computer components, super cars etc, even though they are everyday stuff for a much wider range of demographics than Table tennis, you will never see a single TV advert for them. Simply put, these kind of niche products dont need marketing through a mass media.
CRM on a dedicated media platform is another story though. If you haven't got adblock on, you should see banners of STIGA and Andro advertisements on this very page now, or when you visit OOAK/AlexTT/TTDB. Obviously the users of these sites are direct demographics for these advertisements. This is like seeing an advert of a full page advert of a Jaguar F-Type in a top-gear magazine, or an ASUS ROG Mainboard banner or Tom's Hardware. Butterfly and some chinese companies like Sword, DHS etc are the only ones that are doing their adverts with paperbacks on Table Tennis Kingdom (Japanese) and Table Tennis World (Chinese).
Thus all these lead to one point. Do you really care about their marketing of this sort?
If I am to go to a shop right now, I would probably take a piece of the best rubber I know thats gonna work well for me without thinking (In this case right now, Tenergy). I personally wont go "Hmm, i just saw that Airoc banner on TTD Forum that seems really cool, maybe I should give it a shot for £40 without knowing how its gonna perform." or "Hey I just saw ZJK's setup with VIS, H3N and T64! I am gonna get those since the world champion cant be wrong!" and I am pretty sure most of the people here wont do it (Not sure for the latter one though
).
IMHO the best marketing for sports equipment for a sport that is niche like Table tennis, would be spreading of words between peers and professional reviews, like what Dan does all the time. I dont give a shit about their webpages or social media sites as long as they list the price and the general values of the product.
