by Troy Kirby
with actual sales. The term ROI is meaningless, almost a frightening label to categorize their work. Instead, they focus on the cheap thrills of “branding” as a way of isolating their religious zeal inside a college athletic administration or professional team. Because giving away cheap plastic toys or offering heavily discounted tickets is easier to understand than performing hard sales action, and in some ways, a lot less scary. Say “marketing” to anyone and you’ll see nods of approval delivered in return, along with a lot of unproven theories about why people come to sporting events in general, and what drives them out like stampeding cattle. Everyone believes in the magic of marketing’s importance to gain quick, fast, easy results.
And yet, even with those heavily discounted tickets, or those premium item giveaways, the seats sit empty. This type of marketing religion centers upon the unproven notion that premium item “bribes” are the only factor that get would-be sports attendees to go to a game. No actual proof is ever shown for that marketing plan. Sure, attendance sometimes will rise for those Bobblehead Nights, but if the per cap is dead in the process, because no one buys ancillaries, the cost, time, and effort to initiate the Bobblehead Night never gets factored. I call these expenses “shadow costs” because we tend not to see them buried deep in the budget or marketing structure.
And yet, because of these hidden “shadow costs,” no one asks why Bobblehead Nights typically don’t work as a long-term solution. They are the silver bullet to a bad attendance streak, meant to raise attendance for a game or two, but they are never able to improve attendance long-term, overall. The marketing department also seems to avoid the blame if one of their silver bullet premium item giveaway solutions doesn’t work. Somehow, it’s the sales department’s fault. Marketing never appears answerable for anything.
There is a vast difference between a premium item giveaway to bribe a single game fan who is going to not spend any money on ancillaries compared to a fan who wants a full, in-game experience. That’s where I break away from the idea of marketing being a draw. Marketing departments fail by trying to say the result is people entering the building, rather than the result being what happens when those people are in their seats. There is a big difference in perception of whether a Bobblehead premium item is involved or if it is not.
The fan who is there to get a premium item typically does not pay much for her admission ticket. Think of the worst seat in the house – that is who is getting that premium item Bobblehead. She also parked 15 blocks away to avoid paying in one of the team’s lots, ate at home to eliminate concessions, and bitched about the pricing of merchandise. Why shouldn’t that be cheap also? All of these factors drive up the reasonable question of whether or not premium item giveaways do more harm than good.
The marketing department sees the sales department as ineffective, because fans don’t buy enough long term. But it has been the marketing department's reliance on bribes that creates the confusion about how a customer ends up feeling about each game’s value and whether that value is made long-term. Marketing budgets are bloated exercises of oblivious spending, held together on the notion that throwing money at a problem erases it. Their practices suggest the only true way of presenting an ad buy is to provide deep discounts or other enticements.
All a marketing person seems to do is credit a campaign, slogan, or blanket-spend measure of unproven idioms that never show a result of more paying fans passing through the turnstiles. This is where marketing fails. It is a pseudo-science presented on the notion that the entertainment is not the game, not the experience, but price structure discounting and premium item giveaways to entice a person through the entrance. After that point, the fan is left to his own devices because the marketing arm has completed its job.
Sales is a science, which is why it doesn’t get marketing's respect. Sales is a tough, harsh, and results-driven practice. That’s the main issue with sales for most people entering the sports industry. It does not seem to be that sexy, inviting glamour everyone thinks about when wanting to work in sports. And yet, it does offer the best results for a professional team or college athletic department to succeed.
2 – Why Is This Event Important???
Every sports marketer must ask himself a definitive question: Why is THIS event important? Because it’s a sporting event? Not good enough. Neither is the win-loss record, or some other smallish factors that sports marketers often cloud themselves with believing are important.
Not everyone in your community will recognize your event’s importance. In fact, there will likely be several conflicting events considered more important than your event, happening at the same time. These events may not rise to the importance level of your event in your mind, but to someone else, they just may be. While you believe that your event matters above all else, at every time, the general sports marketing concept that needs to be understood is: No One Knows.
Let’s say that you’ve told 10,000 people about your event. Each of these people has busy lives. Only 10 of the 10,000 show up for the event. Is this a failure of the event to properly promote or a failure in promoting to the wrong people? There may be some truth to that in both scenarios. However, only 10 of the 10,000 were able to segment out a part of their time for the event itself. That means that 9,990 others in this sample size had something else of a higher priority happening.
This illustrates the sports marketer's strategy of mistakes. Each component during the season may be targeting the wrong people. A good analogy is firing a shotgun instead of a rifle. The cold, hard fact of the matter is that when a sports marketer attempts to focus on everyone, she is trying to cover too much space. Instead of generating more attention, the brand gets lost by trying to appeal to all audiences. The worst thing that a sports marketer can do, or any marketer in general, is to believe that first of all, everyone can afford the product, and second, is as a result, going to automatically purchase the product. In this scenario, the marketing plan comes off as mundane, weak or ignorant of what it is speaking to in general.
Who really desires to attend your event? Who would show up with or without a posted schedule? Those diehards, those gear heads, they will find the sporting event no matter how it is promoted. Yet sports marketers spend the majority of their money and resources focused on a constituency that is already going to purchase. The diehard sports fan is not a segment that needs much catering. They will seek out the event as their source of entertainment regardless of the marketing effort. Simply turn on the lights, have the event they lust for, and they will be there, regardless of the promotion.
That contingent may be 10 people or 10,000 but it is usually less than 10 to 15 percent of the entire sports crowd for the venue. The population surrounding any sports venue is not made up of diehards. Not everyone can be into everything all of the time. Thus, people reduce their passion for things into different segmentations. The other factor is that the sports marketer has not focused on the wants, needs and desires of those segmentations outside of the diehard sports fan. That’s why the stadium fills to less than 20 percent capacity.
It is imperative that the sports marketer move away from catering to the diehard sports fan segment. While that group is easy pickings, they will not fill the house on a Wednesday night. As much as the public likes to believe that each of them is an individual or showcase individualistic qualities, when it comes to buying habits or entertainment options, they tend to group into a collective. Some groups are larger than others. People typically group themselves together in buying decisions amid different segment affiliations, mainly due to common interests. It is only natural that they do so, especially when it comes to what the entertainment options available are to them, and whether each group occupies its time with that option.
Let’s target single mothers with children. That sounds like a simplistic sports marketer’s segmentation. While that may appear too specific, it actually has a sound logic based sports branding audience behind it. How uncommon is this for sports in general? Most sporting event
s are attended by men, especially prior to the 1950s. The Chicago Cubs have targeted mothers and children as a customer base for a number of years through its branding efforts, even if they originally didn’t intend to do so. The Chicago Cubs have been one of the few professional teams in the United States who have less than 10 percent of their home games played under lights – they didn’t add stadium lighting until August 8, 1988.
Prior to that time, the majority of their fan segmentation who were able to make the Chicago Cubs’ early afternoon games were mothers, who would bring their small children, especially to the weekday games. The majority of Chicago Cubs sports fans were elsewhere, working in offices. This created a solid branding effort, tying in a grouping of mothers and children, fostering a fan-for-life branding with the children, who once grown with a family of their own, would tie their childhood memories to the Chicago Cubs brand and restart the process with their own children, taken by stay-at-home mothers, to begin again.
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