Sports marketers often viscerally adopt the loudest voices as surrogates for the overall fan base — voices that typically don’t reflect the silent majority.
Because sports is so often an emotional and passion-fueled activity, the chance to discover underlying fan and recreational participant motivations can be invaluable to the development of new products, amenities and promotional activations. Hearing the true voice of the fan or amateur athlete has become more critical in recent years, as financial stakes grow increasingly higher and innovation diffuses at lightspeed.
Yet, as sports marketing has become more specialized, management’s focus is more likely to distort the ability to gauge these perspectives. Sitting at the top of the engagement mountain runs the risk of siloed thinking that often blinds executives to the role of sports within a broader consumer context.
This creates the need for well-executed needs-and-benefits-based research that recognizes often-unfamiliar vantage points for those who assume their audience is just like them. A classic example from sporting goods equipment research is when product engineers, who are typically highly skilled and committed to the sport they work in, sit behind one-way focus group mirrors and gasp at how unsophisticated the recreational athlete is. It’s here that research learnings help to re-orient marketers to a much less-technical message that resonates better with all but the most elite participants.
At the same time, we’ve found that in many participatory sports, elite participants often set the table for those less-accomplished players who seek to emulate them. In the golf industry, this has been articulated as “the pyramid of Influence,” where aspiration often drives less-skilled players to seek magic bullets through technological innovation in equipment.
In spectator sports, the need for marketers to distance themselves from their own opinions is also important. The current emphasis on attracting a broader audience has driven team and event marketers to seek a wider window to fan voices.
However, there’s a danger in relying too heavily on organic listening. It’s incumbent upon sports marketers to level-set the often emotionally charged attitudes disproportionately amplified by social media and sports talk radio.
Sports marketers often viscerally adopt the loudest voices as surrogates for the overall fan base, while proper research emphasizes that these voices typically don’t reflect the silent majority. For example, I can recall many instances where taking a more accurate and measured approach shows significant segments of long-time fans that aren’t a defection risk, regardless of how a team is performing.
That’s not to eschew the real concerns and pain points of other fan segments, and here is where good research can effectively develop the best ways to create meaningful connection.
The simple takeaway is that those who speak the loudest don’t always reflect reality.