The Virtual Terrace • Lenagan predicts Catalans, Toulouse. Toronto, New York in SL
HXSparky wrote:
Sports fans love to follow their team home and away - they want their weekly fix of live sports action. Like it or not, the typical UK RL fan isn't a wealthy individual, and additional travel costs are an important factor when deciding whether to go to a game or not. International travel would make this far worse, although a lot of fans do build in a trip to France into their annual holiday plans.
Expansion to other parts of the UK hasn't been historically been successful at attracting local folk to attend games there. It's easy to say that it's down to inadequate marketing, but all businesses by necessity have a cap on their marketing budget and there's a limit to what can be done. Plus, if the locals aren't interested, then they're never going to become regular attendees. As the saying goes, you can lead a horse to water but not make it drink, and even if you could make it drink, you can't make it like it.
If we shift emphasis to TV too much, the danger is that crowd figures could start to tumble. If a good selection of games are on TV, then why would anyone without an existing allegiance to a team spend the time and money to go to a live game, other than maybe out of curiosity or just for a change very occasionally. Due to the likes of Sky, sports followers in the UK have become channel-hoppers. Fewer people (other than fans of one of the teams involved) sit down and watch an 80/90 minute game end-to-end. If it's a one-sided or boring affair, they'll flick to other channels and watch a bit of golf, RU, darts, snooker, etc. and they'll likely do the same when the adverts come on at half-time. They may, or may not, return to watch the 2nd half depending on what else they find to watch.
I'll agree that all clubs need to do to market themselves better, both within and potentially outside their postcode area, but I think you'll find that most clubs are trying to do this. With a limited budget, it's always going to be very difficult though. This is where the likes of Toronto, and probably New York if that happens, have the advantage of large slugs of money from their owners for marketing purposes.
TV deals are important, but could be counter-productive if overdone. Success in RL has generally been with the help of rich individual investors, and how we attract more of them to the game is perhaps the golden nugget that we need to find?
I think people have a slight misconception about what marketing is. It isn't, and never has been, about trying to make people like things that they don't like, or that they don't want to like. What it is about is developing a product, promoting that product, and making it easy for people to buy it.
At the moment, the sport just doesn't have a unique selling point any more. We used to claim that our USP was that we were a "family sport", when what we really meant by that was "we don't have a hooligan problem". But in 2018, how many sports have a hooligan problem? Even if you want to point to football, the sport has massively changed perceptions and cleaned up its act in that regard.
So what else do we mean by a "family sport"? That we're a "family day out?". If that's the case, do we honestly believe that places like Belle Vue, like The Jungle, like (until recently) Headingley offer what most families with leisure money to spend in 2018 consider to be a "family day out"? Does queuing in the car park at Salford scream "fun for all the family" when, literally across the road, you have a huge leisure complex full of restaurants, an aquarium, Lego Land and god knows how much else?
So what do we promote ourselves as? We can't claim to have the best talent, because we're losing much of it to other sports and leagues because we can't /won't pay them their worth. We don't have the quality of competition or that "edge of the seat thrill" to sell either - the average winning margin in Super League is higher than the Aviva Premiership, and the proportion of games won by one score or less is lower.
So there we have it. Step one of marketing - have a good product - and too many of the clubs have already failed. They're offering a product that is no better than what people can get elsewhere, they're voting for competition structures that they can't understand, and they're offering a fan / customer experience that is no better than any of the other million-and-one leisure pursuits that you can do with the family on a weekend.
I don't think it needs to be said that the clubs are crap at promotiong the product and telling people about it, and I've spoken before about clubs aren't making it easy for people to buy the product either.
As for TV, I don't think we should be seeing it as a threat. The sort of mentality you express there, whilst I understand where it comes from, makes me think of newspapers arguing that the internet will kill journalism. It doesn't, but it does require a new mindset.
Focusing on TV, or digital, or any other media is simply about getting people to engage in RL content. It doesn't really matter whether that is on the terraces on on the TV - the important point is that for that period of time, people are engaging with the sport through one medium or another. The more you can do that, the more interest you generate, and the more valuable our content becomes. You're right in that TV is more passive a medium, but it offers two big benefits - volume of audience, and it removes geographic barriers.
Look at how some US college football teams use social media to promote themselves - there's a lot that all sports (not just RL) can learn from that.
Statistics: Posted by bramleyrhino — Thu Feb 08, 2018 3:12 pm — Replies 51 — Views 1236