It’s all about how to get dat paper! And by “paper” I mean data, obv…

• Syndicated Data (Companies that specialize in acquiring this info and retailing it to companies)
  • US Census
    • Available for free!
  • Demographic profiling
    • Surveys that collect data on consumer interests
  • Audience measurement
    • Nielsen, Google Analytics, etc… not broadly available
  • Broadcast Exposure research
    • Repucom has a proprietary measurement of brand screen time
• Custom Research (getting fresh data on your own)
  • Quantitative Research (#s)
    • Online surveys
    • Intercepts (interviewing in person)
    • Telephone (yikes)
    • Direct Mail
  • Qualitative Research
    • In-Depth Interviews
      • Cost efficiency
      • Deeper insights (due to laddering questions)
    • Focus Groups
      • Work better when homogeneous! Interesting….
    • Ethnography
      • Not popular, probably because of signal-to-noise ratio
    • Other Qualitative Data Sources
      • Market Research Online Community
      • Social Media sites
• Business-to-Business Research
  • Corporate partners
  • Vendors
  • Premium seat holders

Users of Market Research in Sport and Entertainment (uhh, everyone?)

• Professional Sports Leagues
  • Able to do research on behalf of all teams and also help maintain stability of the league internally
• Professional Sports Properties
  • AKA individual teams
• Sponsors
  • Gotta determine that ROI
  • Risks include trying to save money by comingling brand research with sport consumer research, and by outsourcing the work to the agency of record

Applications of Market Research (case studies)

Research by Milkwaukee Bucks showed their fans had high brand awareness and favorable perception of their sponsor, Potawatomi Bingo Casino

Online survey by Seattle Sounders FC showed a focus on price by fans, limited interet in other attractions, opportunistic use of this knowledge to craft a more appealing cost plan

Las Vegas Motor Speedway surveyed their 18-34 demographic and found largely newer and more casual fans, so attempted to attract more with BOGO and bundling food/drink with the ticket package

St. Louis Cardinals surveyed Facebook and Twitter users and found key differences in use of each platform, able then to tailor to each experience

Performing the right research

• Be sure you know your question!
  • As a trained scientist I am very comfortable with this bullet point
• Let your objective define your methodology and never vice versa
• Plan as much as possible
• Have a sense of budget before moving forward
• Search out a research partner, not just a supplier
  • Y’all got any of that market research data?

Demographics do very little explaining of sport consumption. Psychographics may be where it’s at, according to this one dude.

In this chapter, the consumer is the paying customer, though the athletes themselves are also technically a different kind of consumer.

Sports form their own culture, and we are socialized (indoctrinated?) through three paths:

• Behavioral involvement (actually participating)
• Cognitive involvement (sports media, etc.)
• Affective involvement (ads, other pathos tools)

Populations of fans should be segmented, at a minimum, into casual and avid fans, so that your data can reflect their needs and investment more accurately.

Environmental factors that can influence fandom:

• Friends/family (word of mouth, being “born in” a fandom)
• Cultural Norms and Values (traditions in regions of certain sports being played)
• Class (money talks)
• Race and Ethnicity (money gets complicated by racists!)
• Gender and Sexuality (women sports were popular in the past too!)
• Culture in the Global Marketplace (bridging cultural divides is important)
• Market Behavior of Sport Firms (balancing promotion with revenue is a tricky business)
  • CSR (corporate social responsibility) is popular now, more on this in chapter 12

Individual factors that influence someone’s sport identity:

• Self-concept and the social identity (sport plays a role in the concept of self)
• Stages in life or family cycle (60% of NFL fans had their fan identity by age 11)
• Learning (Learn -> feel -> do)
  • Some orgs have tried to increase accessibility to sports by changing up to Feel -> do -> learn or Do -> feel and learn
• Perception (controlling and being aware of perception are key) Factors include:
  • Facility cleanliness
  • Exposure to violence
  • Waste of time/money
• Motivation (achievement, skillfulness, fun, community, entertainment, etc)
• Emotion

Decision making: people decide to try being a sport fan and go through the same sort of decision process they do for anything else. People evaluate their choices post hoc and so sport marketing must determine what decisions they’re making (in real time, if possible) to prevent loss of fandom

This whole chapter was incredibly qualitative, which I suppose is necessary since each sport’s fandom cultures have different appeals that pull in different demographics, but still doesn’t feel too solid. Probably makes more sense when they get applied to specifics in the future chapters.

Strategic Marketing Leadership: marketing management with a plan

A plan should have strategy (the big picture) and tactics (the details), but not just a marketing plan, a full on Marketing Planning Process (MPP) because as someone once said, plans are worthless but planning is priceless

Tennis: available but not well-marketed. Golf: not very available! Major initiative to increase availability happened, but when results were not forthcoming, determined that the game requires highly available time and money, so efforts made to market the fast mode (forward tee box? don’t know how that works but ok). Now Golf 2.0 is an attempt to adapt golf to survive in a changing culture

Hockey has been lagging in popularity in part from its labor strife, but also needs more marketing. This could be quidditch’s future though, with a 5% market share and an avid core fan base that can’t seem to grow past it.

The MPP process is like the scientific method, constantly taking in data to adjust hypothesis and reevaluate regularly

One of the keys to marketing is a Core Vision (it probably helps a lot if your people actually believe it too)

Acronyms:

• SWOT – strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, threats analysis
• DBM – data-based marketing
• CRM – customer relationship management
• ROI – return on investment (but I already knew that one)
• ROO – return on objectives (intuitive)

Whole pages dedicated to specific examples of identifying and/or creating opportunities to partner with other programs to gain marketing advantages and popularize the sport.

The Internet. That’s the whole tweet.

Ambush marketing is pretending to be a sponsor but not actually breaking the law in how you display logos. SNEAKY. The Olympics seem to be a big attractor of this trend.

Fads vs trends. Things that don’t fit into peoples’ lifestyles and meet their needs and lifestyle will fizzle out. Probably some guesswork involved though.

The SWOT analysis will give ideas and vision on how to navigate but it must be reconciled with the Core Vision(tm). At least if you don’t want to be a soulless sellout.

Goals & Objectives: objectives are more tangible and narrower. Goals are often BHAGs (“big, hairy, audacious goals” haha) derived from the vision and served by objectives.

Objectives need to be tuned to the goal. If the goal is something other than money, like prestige or popularity, the objectives must be created and success measured in that language.

For standard sports money goals, use the TiMSS plan to start: Ticket Marketing, Sales and Service.

Marketing segmentation (detailed in ch5) is identifying sub-populations within your population and how to market to each one differently. Depends on good DBM to accurately market to each sub-population (market segment) effectively.

Market development: the Escalator concept. The idea is that people start out as peripheral fans (logical, since we must be stingy with our time/money/energy) and escalate to higher levels of involvement over time. Three part plan as a result: retention (keeping avid fans happy), growth (getting casual fans more involved), and acquisition (acquiring new casual fans).

Positioning is the “positioning” of the product in the mind, to make it more appealing or sticky. Examples given of marketing NASCAR and MLS, but these are still at the executive level, not just marketing a complete product but deciding what direction to take the sport in.

Marketing is made of the 5 Ps, and here is some of John Spoelstra’s advice matched to the relevant P of marketing (since the book suggests they can be matched):

• Bring radio and television production in house (PUBLIC RELATIONS)
• Sell at least 80 percent of all tickets before the opening game (PLACE)
• Develop a full menu of season-ticket packages such as 3-game, 5-game and weekend (PROMOTION)
• Don’t wait for a superstar. Find other ways to sell the team (PRODUCT)
• Remember that on average 50% of local revenue comes from ticket sales and it forms the foundation of the business (PRICE)

(These are just my guesses, the book doesn’t seem to give answers)

The marketing plan must be in line with the vision of senior executives who must back the plan (DUH) and may require taking some risk.

Successful organizations design themselves around their strategies, not the other way around (there is no direct explicit evidence of this, though I can infer that the Washington Power example shows not starting your team at the right time of year can be a disaster). KC Wizards > Washington Power, in terms of marketing.

Step 5: Control and evaluate implementation (use data to test hypotheses, rather than pre-draw your conclusion). Debrief success as well as failure! The point is not whether one finds the true answer; the point is in pursuit of the answer (and also whether you can feed your family that night).

Important equation:

Consumer Satisfaction = Product benefits — Cost

Chapter 2 of the book

There’s a brutal example of not ensuring customer satisfaction in selling cheap tickets with food to try and rustle up a home crowd, annoying the season ticket holders. Satisfaction will hinge on perceived total cost, respect one is treated, and other nebulous concepts that arise from cold hard money-related sources.

I did not realize that FSU had done such intense work with their Seminoles mascot. That’s …. actually pretty cool.

MMP’s ethics framework, from Laura Nash:

1. Have you defined the problem accurately?
2. How would you define the problem if you stood on the other side of the fence?
3. How did this situation occur in the first place?
4. To whom and to what do you give your loyalty?
5. What is your intention?
6. How does this intention compare with probable results?
7. Whom could your decision or action injure?
8. Will you discuss this with affected parties before making the decision?
9. Will your position be valid over the long run?
10. Could you disclose your decision or action without qualm?
11. What is the symbolic potential of your action if understood? If misunderstood?
12. Under what conditions would you make exceptions?

The market research that provides contact and information on avid fans is the center of the marketing plan. Find out what they want, how to make the organization better for them, and then build on that first (retaining avid fans is a higher priority than growing or acquiring fans, since the avid fans provide a much higher value and are more integral to the sport than the hypothetical future fans you might get by marketing to casuals).

Chapter 1 opens with hyping up David Stern, the commissioner of the NBA during its rise to international success. A lot of what he did was not specifically good for the NBA but instead expended NBA resources on making basketball more widely popular in general, even to getting TV stations to broadcast local games, and training Chinese BBall referees in the US.

HMMMMMMM.

Sport marketing can actually be two things: marketing of a sport (most of the book) and using sports to market your thing (chapter 9).

Marketing Myopia (this looks like fun!)

• Focus on selling goods/services instead of identifying needs of customers
• Belief that winning is the only factor in marketing
• Not recognizing promotion’s place in marketing
• Ignorance of competition
• Shortsightedness (not playing the long game)
• Poor quality research
• Poor sales and service
• Arrogance and laziness
• Failure to adapt to the landscape

Bill Veek’s 12 rules basically say to be a good person. I like them.

Waiting for people to come to you = inbound; going to to make sales = outbound

Keys to success of the ‘Cat Crew Internship program:

• Provide titles that match responsibilities
• Support teamwork
• Create opportunity

Sport product:

• Core benefits: Health, entertainment, sociability, achievement
• Generic sport form: play, rules, equipment, etc.
• Specific sport form: soccer, tennis, hockey, etc.
• Marketing mix: procut, place, price, public relations, promotion

Things that make sport product unique:

• The human experience (the intangible nature of being a fan)
• Personal/emotional identification (BIRGing/CORFing)
• Simultaneous production and consumption of product
• Dependence on social facilitation (pandemics are bad for sports watching…)
• Inconsistency and unpredictability (any given day)
• The marketer has little control of the on-field/pitch/green product
  • Must sell the sizzle as much as the steak

Features of the sport market

• Orgs compete and cooperate at the same time (rivalries, league health, etc)
• Many sports consumers consider themselves experts
• Demand fluctuates wildly (potentially high sensitivity to team performance and other factors outside control)
• Near-universal appeal

Sport financing special issues

• Pricing can’t be done by traditional means (esp. since marginal cost for additional unit [fan] is v. small) like with groceries or w/e
• The price of the sport product (ticket) is only part of the cost paid by the consumer
• Indirect revenues are frequently greater than direct operating revenues (sponsorships, etc)

Sport promotion has special issues

• Widespread media exposure is a double edged sword
• Celebrity can transform relationships

That’s all for chapter 1! The end of chapter questions are mostly comprehension, but there is this little gem:

“Discuss how two golf players might consume different products in terms of benefits, sport forms, or marketing mix.” I suppose it’s referring to how one person might play to stay active, another might play primarily to socialize, and a third to have a venue for business negotiations.