The Added Value Playbook
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Chicago Cubs may have not been trying, at first, to sell directly to stay-at-home mothers with children. But that branding segmentation developed because of what the public, not the team, perceived the brand to be. Now that the group segmentation exists, and the franchise saw financial incentive through revenue and attendance, the club chose to target that group and continue that branding effort. But that isn’t the sole focus of their entire marketing effort. It's only component of it; the other market segmentations could be sports traditionalists or out-of-town tourists interested in attending a landmark.
The primary issue of any sports franchise is whether the sports marketer understands and recognizes each target segment and how to reach them. The Chicago Cubs may have originally tried to target the traditional sports attending audience of the 1950s; white working class men. It was the segment most catered to, and viewed likely to afford or attend a live sports function throughout the early twentieth century. The purpose of sports marketing targeting segmentations is to remove the illusion about who actually wants to attend or buy the sports product rather than who may be expected to buy it.
Once the key demographic to a responding segmentation effort is established through discovery, the next step is to determine how to continually reach that segmentation. It may only appear a few times before the demographic dissolves itself, unless the sports marketer pounces and ensures its continual support of the product. The traditional media landscape has failed by ignoring this segmentation erosion. New avenues of media have allowed more channels of input messaging directly to a consumer. However, with multiple channels available, the message can be diluted as each demographic breaks off into segmentation chunks. Each group is smaller now, watching its own specific channel of messaging, and there is far less certainty that one message, or one channel, can create the brand exposure needed to foster the larger audiences desired by the franchise.
Sports marketers have to be able to lean on the mass market appeal of their entertainment value to the wider public. This means using traditional broadcasting methods to reach millions of homes. This form, however, has created a white noise static, where targeting specific messaging to ensure success is not possible. Simply relying on telling people to “come out to the game” is not a wise use of resources. Especially when the “telling” stops short of a simple command structure, or a threat of a television “blackout” or impending “team move” as a result of less attendance. These sort of tactics tend to foster ill-will, negative feelings toward the franchise, rather than showcasing the actual benefits of attending a sporting event.
The term “herding cats” is credible in this case – each individual will resist being brought into the fold without their primary best interests being met. The “cats” in this case will not move forward collectively and will end up doing what they please. However, if you make the sound of an electric can opener, cats will go in that direction. That’s because the motivation changes from what the sports marketer wants to what the actual cats in this scenario desire.
Consider the electric can opener sound to be a media channel. No cat is born with understanding of what the electronic can opener can means. They learn it through experience. Each segment then recalls that channel for their information on what specifically speaks to them. To the sports marketer, it is knowing how to reach each segmented market by finding the “electric can opener sound” that gains their attention, creating the desired affect of opening them to the possibility of receiving what messaging is being sent out.
Here’s the rub though: the sports marketer still has to find out what exactly will pull those “cats” to the event multiple times beyond just running the “electric can opener sound” when they first hear it. Imagine if each day, cats heard the electric can opener sound, but there was no reward at the end of their call to attend the kitchen. After a few times, the electric can opener sound would have little to no affect. Once you disillusion an audience by presenting them with a product that does not meet their expectations, the call to action to get that audience is quelled quick.
That is right where the argument of attending your event over every other event in town becomes a statement of value. Think about that for a moment: how to cause more of an attraction to your event beyond every other distraction in town. While it is important to you that people attend this event, that doesn’t necessarily translate to them actually attending the event. In fact, if every event operator had the ability to make everyone focus primarily on their event, it would be a crowded field, because there are always so many events going on at one time. The difference is the recognition from the public, which doesn’t always focus its attention on everything going on within their area.
This illustrates how the event exists via marketing and what can be done to improve promotion. It’s that “can’t miss idea” that remains within the question of “why is this important to someone else to attend?” Unfortunate as it may seem, this is where the sports marketer often stops, instead of starts, her promotion push. She believes that everyone in the community will attend the event, simply because the sports marketer’s own focus is “on that event.” Life does not work that way, especially as there are more draws than ever which remove the “big event” from taking place.
Consider the “big announcement” that press releases used to have in terms of impact. That was when there were three television stations and five radio stations in a large market place. Now, there are a multitude of ways to push out messaging, and as the platforms expand to social media and other forms of immediate marketing, white noise floods into the community’s listening spectrum. The “big announcement” has been replaced by a bunch of smaller announcements that get fewer eyeballs and less attention than they would have in the past, simply because there is more opportunity to provide a cheap, cost effective system to message everyone in the community at once.
But sports marketers often are ruled by the “big announcement.” In fact, because they feel they are listening to that big announcement 24/7 since it directly affects them, they are less cognizant that the “big announcement” has less impact the further that society goes into a massive messaging future. Any sports marketer who looks at his smart phone and sees the largess of “big announcements” that he tunes out daily in e-mail, social media, text messages, phone calls or push notifications, can instantly relate to the lack of true awareness achieved by those in their community to any “big announcement” at all.
The worst part of any sports marketer’s repertoire beyond the “big announcement” is to focus promotional efforts on the game play of the team. That can be a crutch, even during times of high winning streaks, as there is little ability on behalf of the executive front office to control team performance. It is a live or die by the sword moment for sports marketers who choose to focus their promotional budget and skills toward team on-field performance since it can be an instant collapsible market within a few days if the team starts to tank in the standings.
Actual team game play is only a component of the sports marketing answer. It cannot be the entire value of why a patron decides to attend an event over any other event within the community. This comes back to the massive messaging. Every single event promoter in town feels that her event is primary to the enjoyment of the community, not just sporting events. And that means each of these marketers, whether competing sports teams or art shows or restaurants, are fighting continuously for the patron dollar. The only way to continue to achieve great attendance is through creating added value that increases exponentially compared to the price paid to achieve it.
This is hard for the sports marketer to understand and digest. After all, he completely loves the sport that he is =promoting to the largest degree possible. Therefore, he is the worst type of marketer. Instead of being an influencer, he is an advocate. He is sheltered from realities of community focus, and instead, so pinpoint focused on his own sport he is paid to care about, that he cannot understand how to reach those in the community who otherwise would not
be paying attention to sports in general. A great exercise is to ask these sports marketing gear heads what art shows were open in the same community that night. When they say that they don’t know, ask them how they would be marketed to by an art promoter, because that is who each sports marketer is going after, that elusive non-sports fan who won’t just show up because the doors open anyway.
The advent of digital media helps support building exponential added value to the live experience. Even though there is a live game in town, many are choosing to experience the product in their home, streaming over 5,000 different live events a year. This waters down the live experience argument only because the prospect feels there is an abundant supply of the product on-demand out there. This allows the prospect to further avoid per cap ancillaries such as parking, food, tickets, merchandise or have to sit through a “game” in a three-hour window when the prospect is unable to do much else with their time. Added value, however, defeats all of these