I’ve been paying a lot more attention to sports business lately and as I have been looking around, I have noticed several things that seem to be popping up more and more and are the signs of bad trends facing the industry.
Here’s a quick primer on the industry and the challenges:
Sales:
Right now, sports sales is broken.
There is too much emphasis on a broken sales model built around inside sales teams, sales academies, and high touch single ticket sales opportunities.
Its inefficient.
Branding:
I was alarmed when I was in Europe and I didn’t see one cap, shirt, or marker of an American sports brand.
Brands are our best assets.
Too many of our sports organizations are neglecting them right now.
Marketing:
Too much of what constitutes marketing today is really just poorly created mass advertising.
We have to get our marketing back to focusing on storytelling and emotions.
Other than that, it is commodity type advertising.
Customer Development:
To me this is the combination of branding, marketing, and sales with a focus on creating and keeping customers for the long term, lifetime.
This hasn’t been happening for a long time and you can see the impact in declining sports participation, falling attendance, and dipping ratings.
Long term customer development:
Once you have made the sale, how do you keep the buyer?
Customer service:
What passes in most of our venues has a long way to go.
Angry, disinterested customer service in the venues.
Long lines for bad and expensive F&B.
We have a long way to go.
Value:
We have “membership” schemes now, but do they really add value?
Or, are they just remixing the same tired ideas of season tickets that have failed?
Premium:
More and more of our inventory is premium.
But it is almost at the expense of everything else.
Sure, the revenue is there today, but with so much of what passes as premium being not that premium…how long is this going to last?
Management:
There is an abundance of sports management programs, but that hasn’t led to a lot of better management.
This lack of solid management plays out in ways large and small like poor customer service, poorly thought out ticketing announcements, too much reliance on short-termism.
Leadership:
The above leads into the topic of leadership which is sadly missing in a lot of American society.
The thing about the sports business industry is that we need some long-term thinking and leadership that focuses on brand rebuilding, customer development, and developing the next generation of leaders.