Fans are amazing. Fans have a never ending love/hate relationship with teams, athletes, artists, shows, and also brands. Fans exist for almost everything. You can be a fan of food even, but food cannot reciprocate that feeling. The special thing about fans and what makes fans unique, is the shared empathy that can exist between the fan and, in this example, the sports league.
Having worked in sports, marketing & technology, I have seen first hand the power of fans to drive revenue for sponsors and how accessing the affinity fans have for a sport or team can provide exponential value to the businesses of sport. Fans have come to expect and accept the fact that marketing & advertising can drive their love of the sport to new heights.
The Fan engagement approach I have been working on, to identifies new opportunities to engage, monetize and create maximum value for fans and the entity these fans love
Sports has evolved 100 fold over the last few decades. The addition of second and third screens has create complex challenges for the media distribution and traditional monetization methods deployed by teams, leagues.
Download my approach to understanding fans, the fan journey and you will unlock new ideas on how to maximize value for the fan and the organization. The approach starts with truly getting in the heads of fans. how does the brand fit in their lifestyle? What are the moments over time that decisions happen? What are the insights that can drive enhancing your product, service and interaction plan that can add value to the fan and continue to build loyalty?
The 3 pillars of the future fan that organizations must build off of are:
- Fan Identity
- Data Unification
- Activation Design
The pdf document found here provides a top level understanding of this approach and what it means. It also provides an example in which you could utilize for your own organization.
The key to my approach that has been different than others I have seen is that I have not put any piece of technology in the center, I have put your businesses and the fan on thee same starting line and began to map out where the fan and the business collide. Those collision moments are where the magic can happen.
Identity is critical, especially as we move to a cookieless world, but for those of us that worked in marketing before cookies, I assure you that marketing will be ok. Marketing will only continue to get better as it will force us to be more creative vs. depending solely on data. Owning Identity will be vital to organizations with any relevant size of customer base that provides products and services at scale. Things that are exciting in identity are how we can provide users with better experiences, remove friction in processes, and truly integrate with the fan at ways we never could before.
Unifying data will give use to the massive amounts of data that is going unused in your organization, both static data and dynamic data. If wee start with a useful approach to the unification process that maps back to the orgs play to win strategy, really smart data scientist folks can make amazing things happen. Thee trick is providing the right roadmap for them to follow and react too, simply asking them to unify it won’t be of much help.
Activation design follows my long held philosophy that marketers and advertisers get to create things that didn’t exist before. If we know our fans identity and we have the data unified, the amount of experiences we can bring to life are almost limitless. Combine activation design with my strategic thinking framework and we can make Walt Disney proud in the way we can imagineer a better, more useful and more valuable world for our businesses and our customers.
There are a lot of facets tied to each pillar of this approach and it is critical to think deeply about how this model can benefit your organization.
*disclaimer: these concepts are my own. They have been shaped by my 15 years of experience in marketing & advertising. Some of the design elements in the presentation may be representative of the agencies I have worked for – specifically in design.