Matt Scam­mell, Asso­ciate Glob­al Spon­sor­ship Sales Direc­tor at Man­ches­ter Unit­ed, gave a talk a Dream­force 2014 about the devel­op­ment of CRM ini­tia­tives at the foot­ball club. High­light­ing the impor­tance of seg­men­ta­tion as a means of devel­op­ing sophis­ti­cat­ed per­son­al­iza­tion, the insights are per­ti­nent for brands and busi­ness­es from oth­er indus­tries, as well as the sport itself.

From a mar­ket­ing per­spec­tive, sports fans are the most engaged, loy­al, and ded­i­cat­ed brand advo­cates in the world.

As Rogan Tay­lor, Head of the Uni­ver­si­ty of Liverpool’s foot­ball research unit once said:

“Fans are very dif­fer­ent from cus­tomers of con­ven­tion­al busi­ness­es, no-one has their ash­es scat­tered down the aisle of Tesco.”

And for most fans, foot­ball (or soc­cer for our Amer­i­can read­ers), is more than just a sport or pas­time, but a pas­sion engen­der­ing deep emo­tion­al ties — a ver­i­ta­ble escape from every­day life. Foot­ball fans have dreams, hopes, and desires for their teams, emo­tion­al con­nec­tions that are entire­ly inde­pen­dent of per­for­mance, cus­tomer-cen­tric­i­ty, prac­ti­cal­i­ties or use­ful­ness, as is the case for oth­er busi­ness­es con­sumers may be loy­al to.

Fans pos­sess team affil­i­a­tions that often stretch back sev­er­al gen­er­a­tions, strong rela­tion­ships based upon a sense of his­to­ry and tra­di­tion. It means that sup­port­ers often resent com­mer­cial or brand mar­ket­ing intru­sions into their rela­tion­ships with their clubs.

It means foot­ball clubs have to be spe­cif­ic and rel­e­vant about their mar­ket­ing mes­sages.

Developing CRM Initiatives

For some foot­ball clubs, devel­op­ing mar­ket­ing per­sonas is noth­ing short of a gar­gan­tu­an task. It is believed that Man­ches­ter Unit­ed for exam­ple, have 659 mil­lion fol­low­ers around the world, in ter­ri­to­ries span­ning every cor­ner of the globe from Asia, the Mid­dle East, and North Amer­i­ca, as well as Europe.

How­ev­er, foot­ball clubs are rec­og­niz­ing an emerg­ing need to devel­op CRM ini­tia­tives to bet­ter under­stand, and mar­ket to fans world­wide. At the 2014 Dream­force Con­ven­tion in San Fran­cis­co, Matt Scam­mell, Asso­ciate Glob­al Spon­sor­ship Sales Direc­tor at Man­ches­ter Unit­ed, out­lined the clubs com­mit­ment to devel­op­ing the way it inter­act­ed with fans:

“It’s all about work­ing with our part­ners to acti­vate not just glob­al­ly in terms of vis­i­bil­i­ty but mak­ing it local­ly rel­e­vant to every mar­ket and all the fans we have around the world. Using online and mobile we can devel­op more inti­mate rela­tion­ships [because with every inter­ac­tion] we build up knowl­edge about who that fan is and what type of con­tent they like to con­sume.”

The solu­tion, as is now the case for all con­sumer fac­ing busi­ness­es, is to devel­op sophis­ti­cat­ed CRM mod­els that seg­ment and iden­ti­fy indi­vid­u­als. As Scam­mell con­tin­ues: “we want to turn fol­low­ers into address­able indi­vid­u­als. It’s all very well hav­ing 60 mil­lion fans on Face­book but we real­ly need to know more about them so we can inter­act with them and share their con­tact details with our part­ners.”

Scam­mell revealed that Man­ches­ter Unit­ed will be using a num­ber of Sales­force plat­forms includ­ing Exact­Tar­get, Bud­dy Media and Radi­an 6 to achieve their CRM ambi­tions.

Segmentation

In a study by Gar­ry Adam­son of CRM in the foot­ball indus­try, Adam­son pro­posed that one of the keys to suc­cess­ful CRM for sports fans was in suc­cess­ful seg­men­ta­tion of fans and audi­ences.

In a 2005 sur­vey under­tak­en as part of the study, 72 per­cent of clubs said that they had the abil­i­ty to per­form queries on cus­tomer data. How­ev­er, it remains true that “seg­men­ta­tion” rarely rep­re­sent­ed any­thing more detailed than the sep­a­ra­tion of sea­son tick­et hold­ers and oth­er mem­bers of their data­bas­es. Per­haps for this rea­son, mar­ket­ing rarely extend­ed beyond the realm of sell­ing sea­son tick­ets.

Instead Adam­son sug­gest­ed five dif­fer­ent per­sonas which reveal fas­ci­nat­ing insights about the nature and motives of fanat­ics:

1. The tem­po­rary fan: A fan for a spe­cif­ic peri­od who reverts back to nor­mal pat­terns of behav­ior.
2. The local fan: This fan’s moti­va­tion for sup­port­ing a sports team, event, or play­er is geo­graph­i­cal­ly based, sug­gest­ing that if this per­son moved to anoth­er area then the orig­i­nal iden­ti­fi­ca­tion with the team would sig­nif­i­cant­ly reduce.
3. The devot­ed fan: Remains loy­al to the team despite time or geo­graph­i­cal bound­aries.
4. Fanat­i­cal fans: Almost obses­sive type of sup­port of a team or indi­vid­ual, but where at least one aspect of their lives pro­vides iden­ti­fi­ca­tion that is stronger than being a fan.
5. Dys­func­tion­al fans: Those indi­vid­u­als who gain their main source of self iden­ti­fi­ca­tion from their object of sup­port. Hooli­gans reside in this cat­e­go­ry.

With this kind of seg­men­ta­tion, “casu­al” sup­port­ers who made their buy­ing deci­sion based on con­ve­nience and enter­tain­ment, could be iden­ti­fied. Such sup­port­ers go to watch foot­ball to have a good day out, but they could at any time switch to anoth­er activ­i­ty. It means that val­ue and aware­ness of poten­tial prod­ucts are a key pri­or­i­ty for casu­al sup­port­ers.

On the oth­er end of the spec­trum, “fanat­ics” refers to the group of sup­port­ers who have the deep­est con­nec­tion to the club. The group can be fur­ther split into two sub-seg­ments: those who strong­ly iden­ti­fy with the club itself (club lovers), and those with a deep pas­sion for foot­ball itself (foot­ball lovers). This group of sup­port­ers is like­ly to respond to authen­tic mar­ket­ing mes­sages. Club lovers espe­cial­ly, may be recep­tive to offers of sou­venirs, and club mem­o­ra­bil­ia.

Lessons For Marketers

Foot­ball is a very spe­cif­ic niche. Fans aren’t the same as engaged con­sumers, or even brand advo­cates, and the sug­ges­tion here is not that this approach will work for all brands.

Sports are unique in that the prod­uct is high­ly intan­gi­ble and the val­ue that each par­tic­i­pant or spec­ta­tor draws from a club or brand applies to a spe­cif­ic com­bi­na­tion or set of ben­e­fits. Con­sumer demands fluc­tu­ate wide­ly and its nec­es­sary to ensure mar­ket­ing mes­sages are tai­lored for indi­vid­u­als.

Instead, seg­men­ta­tion should be empha­sized as a means of devel­op­ing sophis­ti­cat­ed per­son­al­iza­tion tech­niques for con­sumers and audi­ences.