by Troy Kirby
negative arguments to the sports brand.
Sports marketers cannot rush the process of delivering a message within a crowded field. Remember, they used to be able to do so in presenting the big announcement. That doesn’t happen anymore. Without proper planning or by implementing impatient messaging, any promotion is likely to fail to get anyone to pay attention to it. The sports marketer of today tends to rush the process. She makes every attempt to worry about covering shortfalls on advanced attendance only two weeks ahead of time. The argument should be to go beyond that date, to start initiating proper planning for marketing an event at least 10-to-12 weeks ahead of the event date in question.
People have busy lives and sports marketers cannot be expected to win over what a person has planned within that schedule with less than two weeks of promotion – if the messaging even reaches the public in time to make them aware that the event exists at all, of course. Messaging is not equal in nature. By the time that a sports franchise or its marketing department is sick to death of a branded messaging campaign delivered to any market, the message may only be starting to permeate the public lexicon.
Messaging is a slow, methodical process, something like a marathon. The end of the message won’t be noticed for a long distance beyond the point where it was initially sent by the sports marketer. There is no way to cheat that process by short-cutting the campaign with a smaller window of time to market into. By shortcutting, the sports marketer is just reducing the maximum possible impact by their lack of planning. It is this impatience which has caused many of the failed marketing campaigns, especially in the college athletic department landscape, where expectations for prospects to start, stop and change their personal plans is an invalid whim by sports marketers who do not understand how proper messaging works, nor how it is achieved.
A sports marketer should start with the right methodology, with several questions that should build the messaging plan. First, why should the public be interested in attending this event at all? The sports marketers cannot base the event’s importance on the fact that they are being paid, or receive some financial incentive for the public to attend the event. That is fairly ridiculous, yet it happens frequently. Because the sports marketer’s job is to get people through the door, they should come since it benefits the sports marketer’s livelihood. Hogwash. Second, what draws people to be interested in attending the event? The answer should eliminate hyperbole, fandom and whatever other corporate-speak model that exists without merit for why patrons attend an event.
3 – Three Customer Value Investments
Customers judge potential purchasing decisions by three values that always play a major role. This is not just a sports industry model, but any business transaction in the world. Trust, Quality and Advocacy. Any person who has made or is considering a transaction will consider these three values as their guide toward that purchasing decision.
A lot of sales focus on the customer service aspect, which only allows for care on the deliverable side of the decision. The purchasing decision, and the customer values which go into those decisions, tend to be ignored. Customer service, while very important, cannot supplant the purchasing decision, because it assumes that the purchase will be made regardless of how the prospective customer is treated up to that point in the sale.
Customer service is the retention side of the house. It is vastly important. So is the back side of the storefront. The business needs to question why a prospect would shop at their store in the first place. Not enough time and care is placed into understanding which of the three customer values are present when a prospect decides on a potential investment. In fact, the majority of the time is spent ignoring that end of the spectrum, as it is assumed that customer service after the sale will ameliorate any shortcomings made prior to the initial purchasing decision. Any good marketer, whether in the sports industry or otherwise, will work on building the three customer value investments along with customer service, in order to ensure that their sales dividend pays.
The sports business world tends to forget about trust, quality and advocacy within each sale decision, especially the initial one. This is because gear heads tend to run the sports industry. Gear heads are people who believe that every person is an automatic fan, like them, who will buy the first time regardless of what they see. This is not true. The majority of fans are not gear heads – they are likely passive fans or people looking for fun. Sports marketer gear heads commonly make this mistake and try to target those “true fans” while forgetting that segment makes up less than 15-to-20 percent of the entire audience.
Trust is a simple concept. Anyone can comprehend the idea of trust. And yet many sports franchises don’t believe that they are required to abide by any bounds of trust toward their fanbase. They’re putting on the game – that should do it, right? In fact, that is why fanbases have begun to erode, because the customer value investment by an attendee has no trust in it. Prospects or long-term customers want to avoid any possible feeling by the brand when making their purchasing decision.
Quality is another simple concept, but it gets ignored by the team once a customer buys the product. After all, isn’t the game enough? No, frankly, the game is not enough. There are 5,000 other games available at any given time in the worldwide market (and growing) via the Internet and locally. What makes your event so much more special than any of those? That is a question that any sports marketer worth his salt should be required to answer. The quality of the product must be as good as possible to the buyer, worth more than the value within the price paid, and the prospect must not regret the purchasing decision after the sale.
Advocacy is the most complex out of any of the three customer values. Unless you gain the other two customer values, it is impossible to achieve customer advocacy for your product. Once the first two values have exceeded customer expectations (exceeded, not just met), then advocacy will happen with potential friends and family. This value comes from a human principle of “watching out for others” – but this principle works both ways. If the quality value of the product is not met, the customer advocacy investment can be used to warn other customers away from the product instead of toward it.
Look no further than entertainment, food and electronic products in terms of how we use each of these values. Consider the amount of times that any friend or relative has warned you off seeing a movie. They’ve seen the film, and they don’t want you to waste a similar investment. They understand your tastes. They didn’t see the value in the investment nor do they want you to waste your investment on the same product. Or, for another example, a neighbor who referred you to a restaurant because the food is great and the service is fantastic. This type of advocacy does not require the two customers to know each other personally: There are reviews of everything from books to electronics online, right now, where customers can share their views on products, to prospects that they do not know, in order to help others make better buying decisions.
That’s where the three customer investment values intersect. Value investment happens all of time, but sports franchises see this type of system as irrelevant. It’s the game that matters. All you have to do is win. Then people will come out. But what happens if the team doesn’t win? How do you sell folks a good product regardless of whether or not the team wins? If the team does not win, does that suggest that the value isn’t there in the product? If so, should the team only charge when the team does win? That would seem crazy, but that is the argument sports industry folks make when excusing empty seats at their games. If we win, then folks will be our friends. Sounds like an abusive relationship of sorts to me.
This all comes down to whether customers feel they should invest in the sports product in general. Beyond the wins, what is it about the franchise or its environment that generates investment? The majority of the time, the public weighs any opinion, valid or invalid, that they receive on a purchasing decision, even if they don’t directly know the person. There is a reason online sites carry reviews under
neath each product. There is also a reason that movie critic quotes and box office weekly revenue takes are displayed as news. It shows the prospective buying public evidence on whether or not a product is good or bad.
It's in our nature to become value advocates for members of society that we do not know. It’s a “pay it forward” concept to warn off a stranger who might make a similar buying decision if the purchase that you made did not meet the first two value investments. Simply put, you are hoping that, in the future, you will receive similar warnings away from bad products from strangers that you do not know as well. It’s as old as the honor system.
This circles back to sports marketing in general. Once a franchise understands the three value systems of investment, the focus should be on what would make a current customer want to recommend the sports product to someone else. The constant issue at play with sports marketers is that most feel as if the customer should just arrive at that conclusion with little or no effort on the