Tag: fan experience

Competing to Win at the Business of Sport

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Soccer Pitch vs. Football Field

Understanding the marketplace structure in which your business operates is essential to unlocking the keys to success. That’s no easy task when it comes to sport brands. Professional sports represent a unique and fascinating market structure from an economics viewpoint. The leagues are close to a monopoly from a product perspective, the teams are an oligopsony from a labor perspective, but they operate somewhat like a competitive market from a fan perspective.

What this means in practice is that sports teams operate differently than almost any other marketplace. Think about a highly competitive market like QSR (quick service restaurants, aka fast food).  McDonald’s, Burger King, and Wendy’s are fighting with some smaller players for a greater share of the burger/fry market. If Wendy’s were to find some competitive advantage that allowed them to dominate the market, achieve 90% share, and drive McDonald’s out of business, their value would skyrocket. But if you look at the marketplace for professional football, if the Las Vegas Raiders were to capture 90% US market share, their value would likely collapse. Driving direct competitors out of the football market would ultimately hurt them.

But some would argue that’s taking the wrong perspective. You should look at it from a franchise perspective. After all, both the NFL and Wendy’s operate on a franchise model. In this model, franchisees aren’t competing against each other, they’re working together to make the sport more successful. In this context, the Dallas Cowboys and the San Fransico 49s aren’t like Wendys and McDonald’s, but more like two Wendy’s in differente towns. Much of that is accurate, but that analogy doesn’t entirely hold either. Chick-fil-A benefits from offering a common experience and consistent quality level across all their stores. Sports teams aggressively compete to be better than their fellow franchisees. They regularly work to take their fellow franchisees’ best employees (coaches and players) and seek to be a superior product rather than an equivalent product on the field of play. The leagues encourage this to some extent, but owners and league officials put guardrails in place (draft order, luxury tax, etc.) to avoid any franchise from being too superior for too long.

So how can a sports team understand their marketplace economics in a way that directs them to greater value? The first job of successful marketing is differentiation.  You must distinguish your product from all of the competitors in your customers’ consideration set. Whether it be price, quality, convenience or any other meaningful benefit for your audience, differentiation is the fundamental objective of brand building. Step one is to identify the competitive set you must differentiate from. That may seem obvious from the standings and the sports news. Your competition is all the teams trying to outperform you on the court, pitch, field or rink. To a great extent, that holds true from the perspective of the General Manager, coach, and players.

But for Team Presidents, CFOs, CMOs, and business managers, focusing on the “obvious competition” is wrong.  The team is competing for wins, but the brand is competing for fan engagement. If people don’t like engaging with Milwaukee Brewers games, only a few die-hard baseball aficionados might switch allegiances to other teams. Instead, most will direct their time, attention, and disposable income to other activities. From a long-term brand health and business value perspective, the Milwaukee Brewers compete more with Six Flags Great America than they do with the Chicago Cubs. For some portion of their audience, they may even be competing more with local golf courses than the Cubs. That competitive framework makes it easier in some ways. The Tennessee Titans, for example, don’t have to match the state-of-the-art stadium experiences in Dallas or Inglewood because that’s not a likely substitute for a greater Nashville sports fan. But it makes it harder in other ways. It won’t matter much if Nashville SC has the best experience in the MLS if they don’t offer a viable audience something unique versus a night on Broadway Street.

To bring this competitive framework to bear, team management can increase fan engagement and the financial value of the franchise by answering the following initial questions:

What is the team’s TAM (Total Addressable Market)?

  • How would you describe the team’s potential fan base geographically, demographically, and psychographically?
  • What is the approximate size of that defined audience?

Who are its most valuable audience segments (e.g., families, couples, corporations, etc.)?

  • Using ticket sales, merchandise sales, and media-viewing data, how do these sub-groups compare in terms of revenue contribution to the team?

What are the most likely competitive entertainment substitutes for the most valuable segments?

  • How does the team compare to these substitutes in terms of overall experience?
  • How does the team compare to these substitutes in terms of overall value?
  • How does the team compare to these substitutes in terms of engagement?
    • Quality (share of mind)
    • Quantity (number of engagements)

What levers can the team utilize to drive higher engagement via:

  • Attendance (games and team events)
  • Viewership (across all media)
  • Merchandise purchases
  • Other (e.g., gambling, fantasy teams)

With this framework in place, teams can develop targeted plans that succeed in the off-field competitive setting of professional sports.

Social Media for Sports: 5 Don’ts and Do’s

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Sports properties have an emotional pull that few other brands do. There are some exceptional brands that reach that level (e.g., Harley Davidson or Gucci), but not with the consistency and intensity of sports teams. Perhaps the most dramatic demonstration of that is how common it is to see a person’s favorite team listed in their obituary. You’re far less likely to come across a mention of their favorite movie or snack food. Nathan Cobb of the Boston Globe coined the term “Red Sox Nation” in 1986, and “nation” has become an apt synonym for a fanbase ever since. It speaks to the way we use teams as both a self-identifier and a means to connect to a larger community.

That unique emotional element makes the marketing of sports unique as well. While many standard branding practices apply, several don’t. This is especially true in the best practices surrounding social media. Social media provides sports brands with a powerful means to foster the emotional, human connection that is so vital to the brand health of a team. But many use it ineffectively by following a standard based on traditional product management rather than embracing the different expectations of sports brand engagement.

I reviewed social media postings for nearly 40 professional sports teams in the US across different leagues and social media platforms and gauged the level of engagement they secured relative to market size (large vs small DMA) and league popularity (e.g., fans and viewership). Individual sports like boxing, golf, and MMA were not included due to the foundational reliance on personality rather than community and collective identity. With those criteria, the common best practices among the higher engagement practitioners reflected these Don’ts and Do’s.

DON’TSDO’S
Rely mostly on game highlights
Fans love highlights, but there are plenty of places to see them. Social media sites shouldn’t try to compete with broadcasters or sports sites that major in highlights. If used, try to find a way to give it an exclusive feel. Show the view of the highlight from the stands, or focus on the reaction of teammates to give it a sense of special access. 		Major in experiences and behind-the-scenes content
Social media is a place to share a view of the team the fan can’t get anywhere else. Fans want to feel like they’ve been granted special insider access to the team. Views from the bullpen, locker room banter, or pranks pulled off in practice are all examples of building an insider view. Showing the players are fans of each other, the team, and the surrounding community goes a long way with a fanbase.
Assume you have a single fan base
People are drawn to a team for various reasons. Family tradition, community pride, sports nerd, etc. Assuming a homogenous fanbase leads to repetitive or irrelevant content. Constantly appealing to the generic average fan will leave the pockets of fandom seeing the team’s social media as bland background noise on their feeds.


Understand you have multiple fan bases
Make use of any data you have to understand the different groups that make up your fanbase: their size, their economic impact, and most importantly their content preferences. Your content calendar should reflect the timing and frequency with which you want to target those different audiences. For example, pre-game may be devoted to fans driven by community pride (“Let’s go Seattle”), post-game to the sports nerd (“Last night was the first time that four players scored in double digits”), and breaks to the nostalgia-seeker (“this happened 20 years ago this week”)
“Broadcast” over social media platforms
Just reformatting the aspect ratio on the same content to run across multiple channels fails to take advantage of what each channel offers and makes the content look repetitive.




Use platforms for what they’re best at
Social media platoforms differ by more than just format. Not only do people bring different expectations to TikTok than they do to Facebook, but they do to the post forms within a platform (e.g Reels vs Phot Posts). Demographic of users differs too. This can be incorporated into the content calendar referenced above. Taken together, the calendar can help organize “when what, and where” for your social postings.
Promote Discounts
Pricing is an art beyond the scope of this analysis. But leading with a discount message (“Get 20% off single game tickets in July”) undercuts what’s supposed to be a special occasion. It implies a lack of interest or demand, especially if they occur with regularity.
Promote Events
Framing discounts as part of a special event drives sales while feeding the aura of attending a game. Using some creativity, almost any deal can be packaged as something more than just a reduced price. “Little Laker Day” for young kids or “Teacher Tribute Night” for role models in the community gives license to discounts without demeaning the product. Just do better than “Fan Appreciation Night”.
Communicate from Team to Fan
There’s a natural desire to put your best foot forward in any communication, including social media. But the more your social media comes off as the “official” voice of the team, the less interesting it tends to become. Personality inspired by a team’s atmosphere or surrounding community is still important within a team’s social brand (e.g., “Grit and Grind Grizzlies”). A memo about last night’s score doesn’t spark engagement.		Communicate from Fan to Fan
At its best, social media interaction should feel like one fan talking to another. Embrace the fan perspective in tone and content. Don’t be afraid to say “ouch” after a tough loss, to repost user content, to have photos or videos that aren’t top quality. There’s often an assumed image of a low-ranking intern behind a team’s account, so don’t be scared to strike a more casual, humorous tone as part of the team voice.

Building on the last point, the critical underlying dynamic is that fandom is a positive feedback loop. Fans are created by other fans. There is no doubt that the strength and weakness of those bonds are linked to wins and losses. But there are numerous examples of winning teams with weak fan support and losing teams with strong fan support. Sports brands with strong emotional connections earn a loyalty that buffers the year-to-year swings in the standings that inevitably occur. A well-constructed social media program can maintain and even build those connections if managed with its strengths and failings in mind.