The sports ecosystem is not at all what it used to be. It’s not just about owners, players, teams, clubs, and franchises and how they fit into a community. It’s much more about how the community and everything that it’s involved in fits with the sports franchise and its players and owners.
We live in a time where the power of global sports makes them matter so much to people that companies, organizations, and institutions — entities that we would never have considered connected in the past — are now connected. All of a sudden, architectural firms are being called on to build new and different stadiums. Engineering firms certainly have their hands in sports management. They’re partnering with ownerships, and the teams add player representation, along with convention and visitors’ bureaus, mayors’ offices, the municipalities, and local nonprofit organizations that serve the community to change people’s lives in different ways. The power of sports and sports-led development create this ecosystem that is really about what we all know and are all searching for: community.
We just talked about the ecosystem in sports. It’s complex. There’s no doubt about that. It’s a fun business to be in, but it’s an expensive business to be in. Many professionals are associated with it, and the ownership of sports franchises, the leagues, and the people that serve within sports management are changing all the time. What I have seen over my career — and something you need to keep in mind in your sports management education — is that evolution in sports is something that we can expect. You can’t always expect to make a profit. You can’t always expect to win. But you can expect that sports is going to evolve, and it’ll evolve quickly.
Fans are obviously hugely important to a sport organization, and it is so much easier to keep a current fan than it is to develop a new one. So, organizations need to be able to use the data they have about their current customers, not only to keep them but also to move them up the ladder so that they go from being what we would call a light user to a medium user to a heavy user. The goal is always to get that fan more engaged with the team. That’s going to help the team in the long run.
The fact that the teams have so much data that they can use to specifically target fans for specific tickets or packages means that the fans are going to get more out of this experience as well, because they’re not just the targets of mass marketing. It helps them to feel a deeper connection to the organization when there is that level of personalization. As online sports management education emphasizes, it’s really important for teams to be able to segment their consumers. In doing so, they can take this segment and market specific products or packages to people who fall into this category, versus something different for this other group of fans.
All the data that organizations now have about their fans is great for being able to develop those segments and also understanding that sometimes a consumer might not stay in the same segment. If we have them here, but we’re moving them up the ladder of going from a light user to a medium user to a heavy user, then they’re going to also maybe fall into a different category or a different segment as their consumption patterns change.
