In online sports management education, you’ll learn a lot about athlete endorsement deals. A small amount of these deals are given for life, and LeBron James is one of just a few athletes who have signed a lifetime deal with Nike. Nike is a very interesting example of a company that wants to be very clear about what kind of brand they are: a brand that represents elite athletes. So when they signed a lifetime deal with LeBron, it was about more than simply people seeing him wearing their shoes and wanting to emulate him.

It was more about representing the direct connection that exists between LeBron James and Nike. This also represents somewhat of an image transfer, meaning that the positive characteristics that people recognize in LeBron will, in their eyes, be extended to Nike as well. The same things can be said about Michael Jordan and his deal with the company.

So, what do LeBron James and Michael Jordan have in common? For one, they have both been great players in their time. They’re also both champions, and many consider both of them to be the greatest basketball players of all time. In that vein, those very characteristics that people associate with LeBron James and Michael Jordan, because of their endorsement association, are now projected onto Nike as well. To achieve this effect, Nike has made a point to go after elite athletes and sports stars, because they represent what their brand strives to represent: greatness.

To gain more understanding of sports management, global sports, and how companies and athletes utilize endorsement deals to improve their brand, sports management education is an excellent resource, and you can even explore it online, from the comfort of your couch.

These days, new technology has expanded the amount of data that we can get from consumers. We can do a deep dive in terms of the psychological profiles of our customers. Improving fan relationships through technology is a new idea in online sports management education.

Moving from Paper to Digital Relationship Management

CRM stands for customer relationship management. In the past, maintaining relationships with customers was a matter of sending mail back and forth. You reached out through regular mail, flyers, and surveys. With these tools, you could gain an understanding of customer needs.

Now, sports organizations have the ability to track data. This information includes not only preferences but also previous consumption and purchasing habits. Global sports organizations even have the ability to go through and understand your bank account or the websites that you have visited. All of this comes together to provide a massive data set that helps us understand who you are as a consumer.

From a consumer’s perspective, this understandably can feel a little invasive. The consumers may not like this. However, if a sports organization can truly comprehend the fan and is using this data as a way to create a relationship with the consumer, then this information can be very helpful.

Harnessing the Benefits of Big Data

Essentially, CRM allows you as an organization to get as much data as possible in terms of the psychological profiles of fans. As any sports management education student knows, the more we know about the fans, the better we are able to cater to their needs. We can more effectively satisfy what they want and deliver what they are looking for as consumers.

Some may think of big data as being too invasive, and they may have a point. However, purely from the standpoint of a trustworthy sports management organization, CRM allows us to utilize fan data so that we can give consumers what they want based on their previous consumption patterns.

It’s really exciting to see the growth and popularity of eSports. They’ve become a significant part of the whole sports ecosystem, and they should be acknowledged in sports management education. The eSports industry is structured quite differently from a lot of other sports businesses in that the publishers who own intellectual properties such as League of Legends and Overwatch are the critical forces that effectively drive the eSports business.

We’re seeing arenas all over the globe being filled with fans who are watching eSports athletes compete against one another. We’re seeing collegiate competitions and scholarships awarded to eSports athletes. It’s becoming bigger and bigger every year, and it should be acknowledged more by online sports management education.

Nowadays, what we’re seeing a lot in social media is what we call “influencers.” Influencers are individuals who are going to influence the mass audience. So, in terms of what these people are, they’re people who have a lot of sway over what the members of the audience want. A lot of audience members follow these individuals on Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook, and they’re likely to do what these influencers do. For example, if an athlete has a certain brand that they prefer, it’s likely that they’ll be able to influence the masses who are following them to prefer that same brand.

What’s interesting about influencers is that these individuals don’t have to come outright and say that they have a partnership with any given brand. What we’ll see with a lot of organizations is that certain partnerships will be made for an athlete to simply use the product, without coming out and saying that they have the partnership deal. So, a certain individual athlete could be filming themselves during a workout wearing a certain brand, knowing that consumers are seeing them work out while wearing it.

It’s important to note that in these situations, the athlete hasn’t come out and said that they’re promoting whatever they’re wearing. They haven’t come out and said that they’re promoting this endorsement in particular. Rather, they’re just interacting with the audience and utilizing the brand without being vocal about it. As a result, the audience has the ability to notice the brand that’s being shown in the scene, and will therefore be influenced by whoever the individual is that’s utilizing the brand.

Sports management education is an excellent avenue to learn more about how athletes and sports stars become influencers, as well as many other concepts related to global sports and sports management. With online sports management education, you can explore these ideas with nothing more than an internet connection.

Anytime a sports organization sets a goal, it needs to be specific and measurable. For example, if we’re saying we want to increase ticket sales, we can measure whether we’ve increased them, but we also need to be specific, saying that we want to see a 2% increase this year. An important lesson in your sports management education is that when we set measurable goals, we can always assess whether we achieve them.

There are several ways that organizations can collect data now to measure whether they’ve achieved what they set out to achieve. They can also measure specific activations and sponsorships through a lot of different data. Everything that’s happening right now in the sports industry is very data-driven. For example, when you’re sitting in an arena, and you see that Coca-Cola logo all around the stadium, there are organizations and partners for organizations who are measuring how many people attended that game, how long that specific logo was shown, what type of value the team is getting from that, and what type of value the sponsor is getting from that.

Additionally, with all the customer data that we have nowadays, we can measure specific things about our sales, and we can point to things like a demographic that bought more tickets this year. Or we can look at purchasing patterns, like, “This specific segment of our fan base is buying their tickets five days before the game, on average, whereas this other group is buying them a month ahead.”

As a result of this info, we can have a better idea of when we should run certain promotions. And if we know a little bit more about different groups in terms of their media consumption, then we can decide things like which groups are likely to respond to promotions on social media and which markets we should probably target with more traditional media buys.

All these types of data are helping to reshape the sports industry. They’re making teams and organizations much smarter about the way they’re marketing to different groups to ensure that they’re hitting people when they want to buy and where they’re going to see these messages. You’ll find out more about how data is changing the world of sports, as well as many concepts surrounding sports management and global sports trends, in your online sports management education.

You don’t have to manage a team or a business to use the skills you get through online sports management education. Here’s an example of how an athlete worked around his brand.

In the 1992 Olympics, the men’s basketball team, and all of Team USA, was sponsored by Reebok. So if they won a medal, there was a specific tracksuit that they were supposed to wear on the medal stand when they received their medals. With global sports like basketball, you have athletes like Michael Jordan, who was sponsored by Nike and had a really strong relationship with Nike.

So for him to be on a sports medal stand wearing Reebok would have probably, in his mind and in Nike’s mind, looked pretty bad. Taking cues from sports management, sometimes athletes can get very creative with the way that they get around this. And so Jordan draped the American flag over his shoulders to cover up that logo and make sure that there were no images of him out there with a Reebok logo on.

This is just one of the ways sports management education works itself into all of the kinds of jobs you can have in sports.

When it comes to the future of sports, it may rely somewhat on sponsorships relating to augmented or virtual reality. We’ve already started seeing it in some cases. At one point, Bud Light sponsored a certain AR (augmented reality) experience, in which individuals would attend a certain sporting event, and if they looked through their phones, they could see a certain Bud Light vendor. However, that vendor didn’t actually exist in front of them. Granted, this vendor wasn’t able to actually sell beers, but it was an interesting experience for the fans and an opportunity for Bud Light to experiment with creating something that didn’t actually exist in the real space.

The trend of consumers being able to interact more with the games is a great one. It provides an additional reason for people to want to come out and attend sporting events. And if sponsors are able to offer opportunities where they provide a way for consumers to interact with any given game, it just gives the fans that much more of a reason to make the effort to attend the event in person, so they can have that interactive experience. This can even just be the foam fingers that fans wave, or the ‘boom clappers’ that make loud noise, as these are things that help people feel like they’re part of the game.

If sponsors, therefore, can partner up with some of these companies and get their brand names on these foam fingers or boom clappers, then consumers will associate the companies with the fun experience they’re having with those items at the game. This is the same sort of reason that sponsors like to team up with sports organizations. Oftentimes, they’re even willing to pay more money to do so, because they know that they’re associating themselves with certain feelings and characteristics that accompany those sports teams.

This could be as simple as a company or organization partnering up with the Golden State Warriors NBA team simply because the Golden State Warriors are champions. The sponsor is actually paying not just for an increase in their visibility, but also, in this case, they’re paying for the ability to be associated with a championship team.

If you invest your time in sports management education, you can learn more about various topics, such as how athletic sponsorships are changing and evolving, why teams and corporations partner up, and many more concepts regarding global sports and sports management. If you haven’t considered online sports management education, it’s perhaps the most convenient and stress-free way to gain this knowledge.

When it comes to naming rights deals, you have several examples just in New York alone. For one, you have MetLife Stadium, which is actually located just over the Hudson River in New Jersey, and it’s the home stadium for both the New York Giants and New York Jets of the NFL. The MetLife corporation has a major presence in New York City, right in the heart of Manhattan, and it has had that presence for decades. So, to see that corporate name associated with major, professional sports franchises certainly serves as a ringing endorsement for both sides in the agreement.

As you continue looking around New York, the New York Mets of MLB have a naming rights deal for their ballpark, Citi Field. That agreement is with Citibank, part of Citicorp, which is another major New York institution. Then, if we move to Brooklyn, there’s the Barclays Center, where the Brooklyn Nets of the NBA play their home games. That naming rights deal is a case of a bank based in the United Kingdom wanting to increase its presence in the United States, and it did so by acquiring the naming rights for a major arena in a major city.

Interestingly enough, when we look at Yankee Stadium in the Bronx, there is no specific naming rights deal for the home of the New York Yankees of MLB. This is a classic example of a stadium being difficult to put another name on, despite the fact that the team has terrific sponsors and gets a large portion of its revenue through sponsorships and naming rights for other parts of the venue. Another similar example is Madison Square Garden. It’s so historic and valued in a very different way that, although there are naming rights opportunities around the venue, it’s still just called Madison Square Garden.

Lastly, there’s Prudential Arena in Newark, New Jersey, which isn’t too far from MetLife Stadium. Prudential purchased the naming rights for the stadium not only to gain a little brand and name recognition but also to signal their presence to the community. It’s important for them that in addition to people recognizing the name of the company, the brand, and what it represents, they also know that the company is physically present in the area.

To learn more about how brands build recognition and establish themselves in their communities, as well as many other useful concepts regarding sports management and global sports, think about giving sports management education a try. With online sports management education, all you’ll need is an internet connection and a passion for learning.

At one point, there was a football game televised on NBC between the Oakland Raiders and the New York Jets, and the game took place in Oakland. Going into the fourth quarter, it looked like the Jets were going to win. However, fans are obviously very passionate about their teams, and they want to see a game to its conclusion.

Well, the game had gone on for pretty long, and NBC was scheduled to show the children’s film, “Heidi.” So, they cut the game short. They stopped showing the game in order to show this children’s TV movie, and fans who were watching from home were livid about it. They flooded the switchboard at NBC. Some people were even actually calling the police department to report this because they were that angry and wanted to see the end of that game.

NBC didn’t really know what to do as they hadn’t even been in this situation before. So, during the movie, they put a little ticker at the bottom of the screen that told viewers that the Raiders had actually won the game. They had come back and scored 21 points in the fourth quarter to beat the Jets. So at that point, fans at least got to know the outcome. However, they were outraged that they weren’t able to watch the end of the game.

This event was monumental in sports media history because afterward NBC installed what they called “Heidi phones.” Basically, they had additional phone lines so that their staff could communicate with one another if this kind of issue ever were to occur again. They did this because communication was a part of the problem. Because the switchboard had been completely flooded, they weren’t able to communicate with each other.

That was one impact of the event. The second impact was that the NFL then wrote into their TV contracts that every game had to be shown to its full conclusion and that the station could never cut in and do something like that again. After that, other leagues followed suit with their own contracts. This is really an example of the legitimization of sports in society and how important something simple like watching a game on TV during the regular season really is to people.

You can learn more about monumental moments in sports media history, plus valuable information on many sports management concepts, global sports trends, and much more with online sports management education. You won’t find a more accessible version of sports management education.

If we look at the two types of analytics that are used in sports today, we’ve got on-field and off-field analytics. The on-field type is often referred to as athlete performance analytics. Whereas the off-field kind is often referred to as sales and marketing analytics, which really helps us understand the revenue streams and the consumer, the sports fan, who’s driving the revenue equation. So, for the off-field analytics, we’re looking at all sorts of demographic data and information about, say, our season-ticket holders, for example.

We’re also looking at the flow of their tickets. Let’s say someone buys a full-season ticket package—41 games, to see an NBA team play. They may only attend 22 of those games. So, what happens with the other 19 games? Do they give those tickets away to friends? Do they sell them? Are they sold, and then resold, and then resold again on the secondary market? If we can follow the trail of these tickets, we get a good sense of how the fan values the sport and values the season-ticket package. And these are important things that we want to know when looking at season-ticket renewals.

We also want to look at the prospects who are buying their tickets as potential season-ticket holders themselves. You can begin to see how this is just one example of a data stream that could really add to the revenue equation for a sports team.

For athlete performance analytics in baseball, for example, there are high-speed cameras and Doppler radar installed within all 30 Major League ballparks. This allows us to capture an enormous volume of data. And we know every movement on the field of a player. But we also have 20 plus metrics on every pitch that is thrown. So we have details on the velocity of the pitch when it leaves the hand of the pitcher and when it crosses the plate.

We know the location of the pitch. We know the movement of the pitch across several axes: the vertical axis and the horizontal axis. We even know the spin of the pitch—both the spin axis and the spin rate of the pitch. All of these diagnostics go a long way toward evaluating the effectiveness of a pitcher or a hitter.

We have the same for batted balls, and we also know where fielders are positioned and how they move across the field when a batted ball is put in play. All of these things give us so much more depth and richness, especially when compared to the data that’s on the back of an old baseball card, for example. These analytics really have changed the way we look at every aspect of these sports, and that’s the world that we’re playing in today.

You can learn much more about how the way we view athletics is changing, as well as concepts relating to global sports and sports management, with online sports management education. There’s no reason you should have to wait any longer for your sports management education, and you can get started exploring the online method of learning right away.