In my last post to New Media Mogul I talked about the challenges that professional sporting organisations face in marketing their sports to customers. I identified that although many traditional marketing principles relate to professional sport, there is something that exists that sees even those teams who don’t win games continue to survive. While sometimes this is because the governing body refuses to let them die, and provides additional funding to see them through, there is something to be said about that as well.
There is surely an emotional core to sport that professional sporting organisations attempt to capitalise on in their marketing efforts. For one thing, it’s why a team like North Melbourne in the AFL has ‘Stay Troo’ as it’s membership drive slogan for 2009, a play on stay true and the club’s moniker, the Kangaroos. In other words the club is appealing to the loyalty of its supporters to buy memberships, even though it has now been ten years since the club won a premiership.
In a similar vein the Western Bulldogs membership slogan for 2009 is ‘Are you with me?’ a similar appeal to loyalty, pride and identification with the team. This is a team that has not won a premiership within the last 50 years, and in any other form of the entertainment industry that sport is nominally a part off, couldn’t hope to survive. It would be akin to a band failing to produce a new record in 50 years and continuing to tour with their old songs – eventually you’d think that their fans would dry up.
Instead they keep on turning out, suggesting that they have a deeper connection with the club that is not just based on winning games, winning premierships and value for money. The noted academic on sports matters, Richard Cashman, suggests that wrapped up in sport is a pervading sense of nationalism, because the way a nation plays sport can define both what it is and what it is not. Cashman cites Anderson when he says that nations aren’t necessarily physical, but can be imagined, and therefore the Western Bulldogs and North Melbourne can be defined as a nations.
Embodied in this feeling that Cashman describes is no doubt a sense of loyalty to this club – indeed he describes it as a ‘deep horizontal comradeship’ that involves a shared sense of history and values.
It’s clear that not everyone gets so embedded in a sporting club, and some professional sporting teams do come and go – clearly because they haven’t marketed themselves properly and have failed to form a strategic relationship with their customers in the manner I talked about in my last post. But perhaps over a longer period of time this changes and people become more deeply involved with their sporting teams, so that it’s no longer just a consumer relationship but an emotional one as well. To me this makes the marketing of professional sporting teams a different process to other entertainment products, and explains why clubs continue to play each week in the face of extended periods of poor performance.
