There are few real "trade associations" in sports marketing the way we know they exist in other industries. The National Sports Forum is a group which exists as a loose association for much of the year, but which comes together annually at rotating sties for a cross-gathering of executives from a variety of different aspects of sports business, including agencies, marketers, promoters, salesmen and event/entertainment hosts. Once a year for the last 17 years, the Forum has met for three days of what the industry calls "best practices" -- sharing the best and most successful ideas from a variety of different sports, teams, venues and events through guest speakers, panels, breakout sessions and social time. The idea behind the Forum is that great ideas come from other great ideas. That is, people in the sports business and sports marketing industry need to hear ideas that have worked for other organizations and then alter them based on what they know about their own organizations to make them work for their own organizations. The Forum also hosts a Case Cup each year. Prior to the start of the conference, teams of Sports Business Master's degree students compete in a competition to resolve a marketing problem in a case study. Last year, the Cup was won by a team from Ohio University.
I like to joke that what in many other industries, including academia, is considered to be plagiarism, we in sports marketing like to call "best practices". At the Forum, however, these practices are not winked at but embraced. That's significant, because from a business perspective sports makes for odd bedfellows. At one level, a basketball team from Chicago competes with a basketball team from Detroit, but their mutual business success is good for the health of their league, the NBA. At a similar level, a hockey team in Boston competes for the sports entertainment dollar with the baseball team from Boston, but they help each other celebrate their championships. And in the NFL, because of revenue sharing, everybody both competes with everybody on and off the field and embraces everybody on and off the field as partners. And the bedfellows don't just share beds across cities and sports, but across aspects of the industry as well. At the Forum, you'll see marketers and corporate sponsors and team executives, people who often find themselves on opposite sides of the negotiating table from each other, sharing ideas, experience and wisdom.
People talk about the importance of networking as career enhancement -- for the individual win. At the National Sports Forum, networking is done not for the win, but for the win-win, to find paths for sponsors, franchises, manufacturers to all get the most out of their mutual partnerships and for agencies to help show them the way.
References:
(n.d.). Retrieved from sports-forum.com
(n.d.). Retrieved from vimeo.com
Louisville to host 2011 national sports forum. (2009, November 21). Retrieved from bizjournals.com/louisville
Thursday, May 31, 2012
Wednesday, May 16, 2012
New Year, Brand New Ballgame
Once upon a time, New Year's Day and college football lived in perfect harmony. You would rise slowly in the late morning, ingest the parades to soak up the hangover, serve up a little Hoppin' John for you and the neighbors, and then watch hour upon hour of the biggest games in the sport -- the Cotton Bowl, the Orange Bowl, the Sugar Bowl and the Rose Bowl -- often with the National Championship at stake.
But then in 1998, the NCAA created the Bowl Championship Series, which made tons of money for certain schools and conferences, but ruined the magic of New Year's Day, which retreated from its full-blossom glory to became a wasteland of lesser bowl games and a magical gold mine for a National Hockey League enterprise. Two recent developments, however, are promising to allow college football to kickoff a brand new era as it kicks off the year.
The first is the obvious and inevitable development of a playoff system, warts and all. The 21st Century sports world simply demands a clear result, and after years of debate and typical Midwestern stubbornness, the Big Ten has finally agreed to allow a playoff. This should help consolidate the bowl schedule, which currently spreads out well beyond New Year's Day through a week-long minefield of games between mid-major type conferences (and in more than one country!) to get to a National Championship game played a month after the regular season. That's a good thing.
The other development is more interesting, because it comes from the marketing side of the event. The Football Bowl Association has joined up with Fishbait Marketing to sell corporate sponsorships across 33 of the 35 bowl games. The two parties will target 30 different sponsorship categories, from auto parts to insurance to credit cards to home improvement stores, to market through all of the bowls in-game, stadium and non-broadcast media assets.
What this means is that now a corporate sponsor can easily create a national strategy for its brand. Previously, a corporate sponsor had to reach out to each individual bowl to make its investment. That was time-consuming and all but impossible to assemble. Now a sponsor can purchase assets and reach a national audience on a consistent basis with one purchase. That development means that previously unsold assets in second and third-tier bowl games will be an added injection of revenue to the process. It's a model that has been tried and proven in tour golf and racing.
How does this help the audience build on New Year's Day? It means that there is more money in the Bowl system, which means that the last conferences holding out for the riches of the old system have had their revenues replaced and then some. That in turn means that they can re-engineer the schedule to create one final championship game, and one other day -- New Year's Day -- that the sport can again completely own.
It's a fairy tale ending a long time coming, that will allow college football and its fans to live happily ever after.
But then in 1998, the NCAA created the Bowl Championship Series, which made tons of money for certain schools and conferences, but ruined the magic of New Year's Day, which retreated from its full-blossom glory to became a wasteland of lesser bowl games and a magical gold mine for a National Hockey League enterprise. Two recent developments, however, are promising to allow college football to kickoff a brand new era as it kicks off the year.
The first is the obvious and inevitable development of a playoff system, warts and all. The 21st Century sports world simply demands a clear result, and after years of debate and typical Midwestern stubbornness, the Big Ten has finally agreed to allow a playoff. This should help consolidate the bowl schedule, which currently spreads out well beyond New Year's Day through a week-long minefield of games between mid-major type conferences (and in more than one country!) to get to a National Championship game played a month after the regular season. That's a good thing.
The other development is more interesting, because it comes from the marketing side of the event. The Football Bowl Association has joined up with Fishbait Marketing to sell corporate sponsorships across 33 of the 35 bowl games. The two parties will target 30 different sponsorship categories, from auto parts to insurance to credit cards to home improvement stores, to market through all of the bowls in-game, stadium and non-broadcast media assets.
What this means is that now a corporate sponsor can easily create a national strategy for its brand. Previously, a corporate sponsor had to reach out to each individual bowl to make its investment. That was time-consuming and all but impossible to assemble. Now a sponsor can purchase assets and reach a national audience on a consistent basis with one purchase. That development means that previously unsold assets in second and third-tier bowl games will be an added injection of revenue to the process. It's a model that has been tried and proven in tour golf and racing.
How does this help the audience build on New Year's Day? It means that there is more money in the Bowl system, which means that the last conferences holding out for the riches of the old system have had their revenues replaced and then some. That in turn means that they can re-engineer the schedule to create one final championship game, and one other day -- New Year's Day -- that the sport can again completely own.
It's a fairy tale ending a long time coming, that will allow college football and its fans to live happily ever after.
Tuesday, May 8, 2012
Assessing Sports Business Opportunities
Trying to understand the concept of a generic sports business opportunity through a traditional PEST business analysis raises inherent problems. Much of the success of any particular sports business is dependent upon decidedly local and specific factors. Without specificity as a filter, it becomes difficult to illustrate the PEST concept for the factors which affect sports businesses in any kind of consistent presentation.
What we can do is assess the factors involved in a PEST analysis more broadly. For example, any sports business has to consider political factors. Those factors can include issues such as tax referendums for stadium issues, watchdog groups that have anti-sports biases, or feuding politicians who may agree or disagree about the merits of an issue but more importantly let their disputes prevent compromise or clear decisions. There probably isn't one great gold standard source that we can identify which would serve as a guide, because as the saying goes, politics is local, and sports politics even more so. The sources that would support this theory are local as well.
Economic factors in the marketplace aren't always as strong a predictor for the success of a franchise as are how well the organization is run and whether or not it succeeds in its field of play. Plenty of franchises have started well with glitzy roll outs in dicey economic times, only to fold or move because their fan base wouldn't support a losing team. Other franchises have continued to persevere to record levels even in the most affected cities of one of the worst recessions in recent history. Indeed, it's hard to see how a franchise can win Stanley Cup championships and sell out a 19,000 seat hockey arena when so much of the city looks like this:
What we can do is assess the factors involved in a PEST analysis more broadly. For example, any sports business has to consider political factors. Those factors can include issues such as tax referendums for stadium issues, watchdog groups that have anti-sports biases, or feuding politicians who may agree or disagree about the merits of an issue but more importantly let their disputes prevent compromise or clear decisions. There probably isn't one great gold standard source that we can identify which would serve as a guide, because as the saying goes, politics is local, and sports politics even more so. The sources that would support this theory are local as well.
Economic factors in the marketplace aren't always as strong a predictor for the success of a franchise as are how well the organization is run and whether or not it succeeds in its field of play. Plenty of franchises have started well with glitzy roll outs in dicey economic times, only to fold or move because their fan base wouldn't support a losing team. Other franchises have continued to persevere to record levels even in the most affected cities of one of the worst recessions in recent history. Indeed, it's hard to see how a franchise can win Stanley Cup championships and sell out a 19,000 seat hockey arena when so much of the city looks like this:
But Detroit has done it, so any source taking a wide look at economic factors would suggest that a franchise would have a difficult time in Detroit, but the Red Wings have proved to be a local exception.
Generic socio-cultural factors are probably a little more easy to assess on a broad basis. We can probably speculate that a hockey team, for example, is going to have a harder time in a region where a franchise in the sport has failed previously, regardless of the cause. Even when franchises have been well-run and invested in growing the sport at the youth level in an attempt to create an organic fan base, that fan base has not always responded at the primary level of business. We can also determine whether cities and markets have failed to enthusiastically support franchises even when the franchises win or have historic ties. But these factors are still local rather than global, and thus the sourcing for these factors is local as well.
When it comes to technology in sports, there are all kinds of sources that can review different offerings such as advancements for distribution channels for sports, investments in venues or devices that can be used to enhance the in-stadium experience. But ultimately the operators of any individual franchise have to understand how the devices work for their particular organization. Though there is a standard of best practices in the industry, not all practices work equally in every sport or for every team.
So in the end, the point here is that there are plenty of sources that can help people looking to create an opportunity in sports understand the qualities, possibilities and limitations of that opportunity, but there aren't many one-stop shops, and there certainly aren't any one-stop applications of the counsel. Ultimately, to do a proper PEST analysis for a sports-based project, those in charge of the project are going to have to understand a lot about themselves and what they offer first.
Photo Reference:
Marchand, Y., & Meffre, R. (2011). The ruins of detroit. London: Steidl Publishing.
Wednesday, May 2, 2012
An All-American Opportunity
This is going to be an interesting year for the Houston Astros. Not because of what they are likely to do on the field. Far from it. Coming off their worst-ever season in 2011, with 106 losses, the Astros are unlikely to offer much competition to their divisional rivals. But they are going through major changes -- perhaps the largest changes they have experienced in their 50-year franchise history -- that will change the way the team behaves off the field.
The most significant of these changes is that the Astros have new ownership, led by Jim Crane, who has brought in new business leadership and new front office management to the franchise. Additionally, this will be the last season that the Astros play in the National League. In 2013, they will move to the American League to help balance baseball with 15 teams in each league and 5 in each of three divisions per league. (Currently, there are 16 teams in the National League, with 6 in the NL Central. The Astros will move from the Central to the 4-team AL West).
While this is undeniably a challenge, especially considering the team's on-field shortcomings, the Astros are instead choosing to look at this as an opportunity to upgrade their branding and operations. That upgrade could include the cosmetic, such as new uniforms, as well as policies and procedures that affect the game day experience inside Minute Maid Park and how the team interacts with customers outside the ball park. The only thing that seems to be off the table is that the team is going to keep "Astros" as its nickname.
The Astros realized that they couldn't do this alone, and so they have organized an interactive research campaign with Major League Baseball Advanced Media (MLBAM), to help them interact with a variety of different consumers of the Astros product. The benefits of such an undertaking are both direct and indirect. Directly, the franchise will improve on several subjects that fans and consumers have found lacking. Indirectly, the use of fan-based research helps create better engagement with fans and, hopefully, more satisfaction because the fans believe that the franchise is open to hearing their issues and suggestions.
Opportunities to create these kinds of major reorganizations are extremely rare. They can only exist at times of major change -- change in ownership, change in location or arena, change in function (such as switching to another league), and so on. For the Astros, several of these are occurring at once, and considering that they are joining a division with the Rangers and Angels and leaving one that has the Pirates and Cubs, the climb to once again becoming a healthy franchise off-the-field seems a lot less daunting than that of becoming a winning team on the field.
The most significant of these changes is that the Astros have new ownership, led by Jim Crane, who has brought in new business leadership and new front office management to the franchise. Additionally, this will be the last season that the Astros play in the National League. In 2013, they will move to the American League to help balance baseball with 15 teams in each league and 5 in each of three divisions per league. (Currently, there are 16 teams in the National League, with 6 in the NL Central. The Astros will move from the Central to the 4-team AL West).
While this is undeniably a challenge, especially considering the team's on-field shortcomings, the Astros are instead choosing to look at this as an opportunity to upgrade their branding and operations. That upgrade could include the cosmetic, such as new uniforms, as well as policies and procedures that affect the game day experience inside Minute Maid Park and how the team interacts with customers outside the ball park. The only thing that seems to be off the table is that the team is going to keep "Astros" as its nickname.
The Astros realized that they couldn't do this alone, and so they have organized an interactive research campaign with Major League Baseball Advanced Media (MLBAM), to help them interact with a variety of different consumers of the Astros product. The benefits of such an undertaking are both direct and indirect. Directly, the franchise will improve on several subjects that fans and consumers have found lacking. Indirectly, the use of fan-based research helps create better engagement with fans and, hopefully, more satisfaction because the fans believe that the franchise is open to hearing their issues and suggestions.
Opportunities to create these kinds of major reorganizations are extremely rare. They can only exist at times of major change -- change in ownership, change in location or arena, change in function (such as switching to another league), and so on. For the Astros, several of these are occurring at once, and considering that they are joining a division with the Rangers and Angels and leaving one that has the Pirates and Cubs, the climb to once again becoming a healthy franchise off-the-field seems a lot less daunting than that of becoming a winning team on the field.
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