Sunday, October 22, 2017

Engaging passionate sports fans and followers to generate revenues for companies, sponsors and tournament organizers


Situation:
Millions of people from around the world play or watch sports. People often follow multiple sports, teams and individual sports personalities. For the sake of this paper, we will just focus on one sport – Tennis. There are lot of schools, colleges and sports academy around the world where tennis is being taught. The students from all these schools, coaches and working professionals around the globe follow tennis and are fans of their favorite tennis players.
Complication:
There are few tennis player fan clubs on Instagram and Facebook but all are very disintegrated and none of them has enough appeal to keep fans engaged for long. Also, they are only there to give regular updates of the ongoing tournaments and match scores but nothing more than that. Also, the major tournament (Four grand slams and ATP World Tour) organizers focus merely on ticket selling but not connecting the fans. They are not able to do it because they don’t ask enough questions while selling the tickets. They have the best opportunity to sell tickets at higher price, engage more businesses in the process but are not doing it. People following specific fan in Facebook could be a quick breakthrough for companies looking for fans but still not 100% effective when it comes to engaging fans.
Question:
How can we increase the engagement of the fans and generate higher revenues for businesses out of it, creating a win-win situation?
Methodology:
·       Create a survey questionnaire asking for:

1)      Name
2)      Address (Home country and current address)
3)      Gender
4)      Age (10-18: Value 1, 18-25, Value 2, 26-32, Value 3, 32-40, Value 4, 40 onwards, Value 5)
5)      Favorite player
6)      2nd favorite player
7)      Favorite grand slam
8)      Avg. No. of times tennis being watched in a month
9)      Avg. No. of times tennis being played in a month
10)   Social media network used (e.g. Facebook, Instagram, Both)
11)   Favorite sports accessory (Cap, T-shirt, shoes etc.)
12)   Last Grand Slam/ATP Tournament visited if any
13)   Self- rating as a fan (Crazy =1, V. Good =2, Good = 3, Avg. = 4, So called = 5)
14)   No. of meetings with other fans in a month. State the names of two other fans with whom you are connected.
15)   Willingness to travel and spend time with other fans (Yes/No)
16)   Profession and Role (Hierarchy)

·       Roll out this survey to tennis academies, schools, universities and big grand slam events where thousands of fans purchase their tickets. Survey could also be rolled out on Social Media.
·       In order to receive more number of responses of surveys and ensuring success of it, several different strategies can be used including draws, discounted tickets to tournaments, goodies, etc.
·       Once we have the survey responses from around the world, we can use social network analysis for the resulting 2-mode network.
·       Dichotomize the data at fan level 1 for a specific favorite player and analyze using SNA network cohesion features.
Recommendation:
Ø  SNA would be a very appropriate tool for answering the overarching question because it allows to look at:
·      Sub-groups and Cliques:  Looking at groups within Academy, Sports Clubs, City, Country, Age, Similar Career Interests, etc.
·      Betweenness: Looking at the shortest path to reach other fans and see who can influence who
And other measures like Eigen-Vector, Factions and Degree Centrality once we focus on certain attributes.

 
Companies can form strategies to:
Looking at the sports value chain as mentioned below, companies can target all the four pillars of sports value chain.



·     Gather group of like-minded fans, run marketing and sales campaigns of specific products, sell them sections of fan specific stadium tickets, organize celebrity meetups and group activities.
·     Connect with Hotels, Tournament Sponsors, Travel & Airline companies, Official Beverage partner, Sports branding  and goods companies to form a club allowing for revenue with membership fees and organize fan oriented events, creating a win-win situation.
Outcome:
Due to increased engagement, relationships among fans could be developed over time and it could further create more business opportunities.

Previous blog used as reference:


I am not taking 2nd module of the course







1 comment:

Christopher Tunnard said...

This is the start of a good idea, but what you have briefly outlined is, essentially, a survey to gather attribute data. You mention 2-mode networks, but which ones? And "network cohesion methods," but again, which ones would you use. You mention subgroups and cliques, but how would they provide insight into generating higher revenues and creating the "win-win situation" you allude to?

I agree that such a survey might lead to "increased engagement," but it remains to be seen how network analysis could enhance the results. A bit more thought and time might have yielded more details and could still form the basis for an interesting SNA study. There are a number of similar ones on line, especially for football/soccer.