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:
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.
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