• by Jon Last , Columnist, October 9, 2024

Just last week I participated in a golf industry conference panel that shared best practices in the use of big data to gain greater insight into consumer behavior.  Certainly, tracking fan spending coupled with the recency and frequency of engagement are foundations for identifying best customers.  They reveal the “who” and the “how.”

But I also suggested the opportunity to be found through greater deployment of qualitative research to discover the “why.”  The motivations behind consumer behaviors remain critical to crafting the right tonality and placement of messaging, which ultimately leads to greater connection with sports fans.

This seems even more critical in today’s cluttered sports marketing landscape, as connection seems to be a word that is frequently used but often misunderstood.  We have seen lots of data that demonstrates the unique ability of live sports to deliver fan attention.  But some new data that we’ve just received has me questioning whether we are truly optimizing our ability to use the sports environment to connect optimally with our targets. It appears that we may not be letting our media work hard enough to deliver connection beyond attention. That is a missed opportunity.

As a case in point, we found last month that while some 41% of sports fans strongly agreed that they were well informed about their favorite sports, only a third felt well connected to their favorite teams, and just one in five felt well connected to their favorite athletes. Searching for greater understanding of what might be driving these trends, in the same study a majority of fans agreed that “Sports coverage today should be less focused on what’s going on off the field.”  This sentiment was even stronger among the coveted age 25-34 demographic, where 62% were in agreement.  Similarly, just under 2/3 of fans aged 65+ expressed a desire for less attention to be paid to off-field activities.

Could it be we’re inundating fans with too much superfluous information?  I’d maintain that the proliferation of touch points driven by citizen journalism and social media could be partly behind this sentiment.  But I also believe that an impassioned desire to break through the clutter is leading to suboptimal and often untested messaging that is either pandering to less-committed fan segments, trying too hard to be cutting-edge, or both.  Marketers that rely too much on social media conversation for the “why” rather than on carefully executed qualitative research may amplify those who speak the loudest, rather than the more representative majority of fans asking for better connection.