For sports marketers, it is not enough to simply say they want to achieve access to every segmented market, or to reach every person within those segmented markets equally. That is both unacceptable and unrealistic. There are several factors at play here. First, is the time investment by the sports marketer worth the segmentation they are attempting to reach? Second, can the segment not only afford the product, but react in a positive way and create a purchasing decision because of the marketing? Both of these questions must be answered, honestly and effectively, prior to a sports marketer investing time and resources into any segmentation for an event.
This is the paradoxical nature of sports marketing: marketing to all segments while accepting the idea that some constituencies within those targeted segments will not be reactive to the messaging or spend toward the product after receiving the message. Marketers must carefully evaluate how much the message will cost in relation to what the customer will spend in return, and what staff resources will be used to initiate that messaging in the first place.
It comes down to sports marketers recognizing that they have to avoid spending time, energy and budget in a futile attempt to attract a constituency segmentation within the community who will not be reactive to the product and will not make a purchasing decision based on the promotion efforts. This affordability factor seems to justify avoiding and neglecting other potential segmented constituencies within the community since they are viewed as less reactive to the messaging. This can come from personal bias or stereotypes, rather than whether or not the segmentation can actually afford the product in general. By ignoring and avoiding these segments, the sports marketer ends up leaving valuable money on the table by using a pseudo-intuition rather than statistic fact or measurements.
Each sports marketing build-out must be a slow-going process in an methodical effort toward initiating purchasing decisions and creating sales. Marketing impatience is nothing but scattered, unimaginative failures of objectives. It assumes that whatever is put out there is enough, since everyone is supposedly a potential consumer of the product, but it ends up speaking to no one in general.
One of the best remedies is to decide to sell a non-sports product. The goal is to do it for a night or weekend, to discover not only how the customer reacts to the process, but also the different ways in which the seller is presenting bias in messaging. Only after promoting something completely foreign to their passion are they able to separate themselves from bias, testing their skills as an overall marketer, and display a messaging acumen worthy to promote a sports franchise’s product. This allows the sports marketer to learn to see how prospects and customers experience the product’s offering through messaging and how to effectively gain an return on investment by the messaging sent.
Stereotype is one of the issues that sports marketers should avoid accepting as fact. When something is applied as universal without different circumstances, it usually means that it is incorrect by the advice giver. Stereotype does not take into account the many different climates or market variables. It simply says that it was performed correctly or incorrectly at this one market, at a specific point in time for technology and economic growth, and therefore can be duplicated without alteration anywhere. That’s a rubber stamp method. If a sports marketer follows anything that is written, including this text, without attempting to adapt their own skillset within the process and design, they are destined to showcase lazy marketing.
Each marketing principle or value used by the organization must be instilled in its staff for that messaging campaign to be taken seriously. Since each organization differs from top to bottom, there is no way to operate a one-size-fits-all plan of implementation from organization to organization. Garnering live attendance will become tougher as technology changes, due to the unwillingness or inexperience of venue operations to continually adapt their messaging tactics to the shifting times. Recruiting fans is similar to a college athletic department recruiting student athletes. Each fan has set opinions, tastes, and a lack of an attention span dedicated solely for the sports product.
The sports marketers should push further in examining exactly what the sellable product is. There is an opportunity to sell something new to prospects in a dynamic way. The only ground rule is that it cannot interfere with the game on the field of play, such as having a group of mascots run onto the field while a team is batting in the bottom of the seventh. That turns off everyone, including the gear heads, and harms the brand long-term. These types of gimmicks do not draw people; they insult them.
The public participates in the sports marketing product directly or indirectly. The crowd must believe that the entire course of the in-game promotion is legitimate to the both the player and those watching, even in situations where the promotion is clearly unfair. This allows each patron to believe that there is an opportunity for fairness within the promotion’s rules. Even the Washington Generals needed to have some sort of change, despite the vast distance between winning games against the Harlem Globetrotters.
The word “entertainment” has been severely damaged over the past 20-30 years. It now suggests that blasting people’s senses is the only way to get their attention. That means multiple points of entry via music, graphics, lights and mascots are all that sports marketing now relies on in order to be successful. But flash and bang aside, all of those things can be achieved on a mobile device or computer, without attending the live experience.
The key to any entertainment marketing is the ability to distract. It is about eliminating whatever issues that the receiver has going on in their life, and replacing it with something joyful. Whatever the life traumas are, though they may somehow be still present, within that set period of time, they can be avoided or ignored. That is why the customer seeks out the entertainment experience and requests to relive it again, several times over, because it distracts them from the daily harsh realities that they face.
For too long, sports marketers have assumed that entertainment is tied to the cost per ticket entry. It is not. In fact, if the sports product has an entertainment value which is grand enough, there is no cost too high for those who wish to obtain it. Even those who cannot afford the cost, will make attempts to experience it, if the entertainment value is high enough. This is the true nature of secondary value being laid into the product. It all depends on whether or not there is enough demand for the secondary value.
Notice how music concert tickets can sell for $1,000 each for touring acts, yet there are always musicians playing bar gigs for $5 covers. Why doesn’t the bar gig draw more fans with its cheaper price point? Because the secondary value is nothing compared to the major touring act. The price point is irrelevant to the expected secondary value and experience laid into the cost of admission.