Study your fans to stay on the ball

By SIMON HENDERY

For sports marketing consultant Simon Arkwright, a game is never just a game.

Being courtside at a basketball game or in the stands at a rugby match involves scanning the crowd to pick out the "besotted supporters", the "unattached fans", those on a "date" with the particular code and those who are "married" to the game they are watching.

"When I go to a sports event I never quite leave the office because I'm always observing things and plugging them into my model," Arkwright says.

He calls his model PassionEight because it is about the passions and relationships fans have with a particular team, event, competition or code, and the implication that has on marketing.

Arkwright's background was in financial services marketing but he moved to sports marketing in 2000 when the Hurricanes became a client. His nine-year-old company's now complete focus on sport is being marked this month with a change of name from Market Intelligence to Sport Intelligence.

"I'm keen on the fact that what a sports franchise needs to do is communicate strongly to its fan base what it means to be a fan of that particular team," he says.

"If you do that well, you're able to leverage off it in terms of revenue opportunities.

"If you're a Mooloo supporter, what it means is you buy a rugby jersey, take along the Mooloo bell and you yell like hell. If you happen to be a test cricket supporter, it means you take along your pink gin and clap."

While other sports marketing models place great weight on franchises achieving financial success by being at the top of their particular league, Arkwright says that is not necessarily a requirement.

"Besotted" supporters - a very loyal group that would include season ticket-holders - are at the centre of a fan base but also require significant resources in terms of contact time for a franchise and its players.

In comparison, corporate box-holders typically require less contact but generate a lot of income.

Arkwright says sports managers need to understand what passions are most relevant for their franchise at a particular time and from that the business opportunities will become obvious.

"It's not necessarily just about trying to get fans to be besotted supporters. The Sevens are all about passion for a party. It's a lower-level passion but, basically, you can run a business off it."

Arkwright says PassionEight is the first model of its type to pull all eight passions together and argue that all are "in play" all the time.

PassionEight is used by eight professional sport franchises (the Harvey Norman NZ Breakers, the Chiefs, Hurricanes, Highlanders, and the Waikato, Wellington, Hawke's Bay and Otago rugby unions), and Wellington's Westpac Stadium.

Research on the Breakers before and after this year's season shows how the strengths and importance of the different passions change. Over that time, Arkwright says, passion for novelty among Breakers followers moved from "strong to weak" whereas passion for team has gone from being "weak/moderate" to "moderate/strong".

Breakers sponsorship manager Richard Clarke says: "PassionEight provides us with an instant picture of where we are at.

"It gives us a clear picture of what we are doing well and where we need to improve on. We can see where we are connecting with our fans and use this information to determine strategies for developing these fan relationships to where we want them to be."

However, the franchise has not yet gone public on what changes, if any, it will be implementing as a result of its PassionEight findings.

Peter Cox, the former general manager of the Football Kingz, said PassionEight allowed easy justification of chosen strategies to key stakeholders and sponsors.

"The well-designed conceptual 'metaphors' allow team management, sponsors and other stakeholders to be confident of achieving and, even exceeding, their marketing and promotional goals and objectives," he said.

* Simon Arkwright is running a Passion Eight workshop at Eden Park on September 9.