An Analysis of Sports Consumers
This blog summarises the behaviour of football fans and sports consumers. The report finds that the modern fan aged 16-24 wants more interactivity and connection with their sports team, and also wants more content in all forms to do with their team to enrich their supporting experience, specifically via social media and video platforms. This is further instilled with older, match-going fans holding the same view but more towards the match day experience.
Sport consumer behaviour is defined as the psychological and physical responses that occur before, during and after the use of a sport product or service (Funk, Alexandris and McDonald, 2016).
It is said that a sport organisation’s key function is to enhance such interactions in order to maximise the experience for the consumer, with a fundamental assumption that satisfaction with the overall sport experience will enhance customer engagement (Funk, Alexandris and McDonald, 2016). This means that owners and people in control of sport organisations need to find the motivations of sport fans and what makes them interact with the sport product as a whole as means to drive more revenue and interactions.
It is extremely important for sports organisations and clubs understand the current trends in the market and the needs and wants of their consumers to adapt their products and services to drive more revenue.
In order for these organisations to truly understand fan and customer behaviour, they need to understand why they buy by learning more of the customers decision making process, apply this behaviour to marketing, more specifically the 4 P’s, and also gain a deeper understanding of each type of individual consumer such as psychological responses including perceptions, emotions and evaluations (Funk, 2008). Finally, they need to explore external influences on customers before they can craft their marketing strategy and implement it.
Organisations need to also realise that the fan experience is not one size fits all and they will have to implement various consumer ‘touch points’ throughout the experience through consistently engaging with all customers.
This is made easier as there has been a segmentation made with certain sports consumers, defined into four categories: Passive sport consumers, consumers of tangible sport products, active sport consumers and consumers of sport events (Funk, Alexandris and McDonald, 2016).
Motivation refers to the processes that cause people to behave as they do. From a psychological perspective motivation occurs when a need is aroused that the consumer wishes to satisfy (Solomon et al, 2006).
The behaviour of sport and football consumers is changing, this is mainly through different age groups having different motivators to interact with the sport product as a whole.
For example, the ‘modern fan’ which is classed as fans aged 16-24, tend to idolise star players a lot more than older generations, as twelve footballers have more than 10 million Twitter followers whereas only five clubs have reached that milestone (Copa90, 2019). Also, when Cristiano Ronaldo moved from Real Madrid to Juventus in 2018, Juventus gained 4.7 million fans and Real Madrid lost a million (Copa90, 2019). This demonstrates a paradigm shift as the modern fan is more likely to read or interact with a sport product if there is a star player involved. This could lead to clubs taking into account a players social media following before signing them, as in the modern game they are used as much as a marketing tool as they are a player, as certain players can bring in different fanbases from other countries for example because Son Heung-Min playing for Spurs, 21% of South Koreans considered Tottenham their favourite football team, equating to 11 million people, which is more fans than the club have in the UK (Osborne, 2020).
This behaviour could have a knock-on effect in the game, as there is statistically a 7.5% chance of higher readership in print advertising when a celebrity is featured, with some brands achieving a 20% growth in sales due to celebrity endorsement, with the likes of KFC, Fly Emirates and Nike have all used this tactic with the most well-known footballer on the globe, Cristiano Ronaldo (Nielsen Sports, 2014). These businesses have used Ronaldo as their supplier search for their advertising needs in the B2B search and evaluation process model (Kotler, et al, 2017) as they recognise the behaviour of how sports consumers, specifically in emerging territories like China idolise and want to replicate him.
Furthermore, this could help sports consumers be more aware of other products in the same sphere through the awareness phase of the adoption process (iEduNote, n.d.) as the more recognisable star players make them more inclined to take an interest and eventually adopt the new product if a familiar star player is endorsing it.
Another key trait of the modern fan is that they always want more from their club, as 50% of modern fans want more immersion while watching live football while 33% want increased interactivity (Copa90, 2019). This means that clubs need to do more to create further fan engagement within games. Fan engagement is the growth strategy of long-term relationship management between sports institutions and fan groups, where institutions facilitate fans in self-expression and in-group acceptance using both modern online and offline technologies with the goal of creating social value for fans which can be turned into profit optimisation (Schnater, 2016). Clubs could use star players as a method of achieving this by creating interactive activities surrounding these players.
Also, Wilson and Fowler’s model on fan engagement to help with this (Wilson and Fowler, 2016), as on a match day, clubs can enhance the live experience on site by trying to improve the atmosphere for fans and addressing ‘pain points’ and further understanding the fan journey on match days to make it a more enjoyable overall experience for fans. Also, clubs can work on bringing fans closer to the live action when they are watching but not at the stadium, as behind-the-scenes footage is becoming increasingly more appealing to fans (Wilson and Fowler, 2016). Fans have also demonstrated behaviour leaning towards live streaming services like Facebook and YouTube or wanting to watch a match with a pitch side view via a VR headset. Clubs are constantly needing to try and innovate the interactivity of their sports products and add more touch points to increase engagement of the sports consumer who keeps wanting more.
The modern football fan in this era has an insatiable appetite for bitesize chunks of football content such as gifs, videos and memes (Copa90, 2019) and clubs are successfully adhering to this as all 20 Premier League teams have TikTok accounts (FC Masks, 2021), the video platform boasts over one billion users worldwide with 60% of its users aged 16-24 (Doyle, 2021), which is the perfect demographic for the modern fan, so clubs can use this platform to increase interactions between themselves and their fans and it enables them to recognise trends in the younger generation much easier.
Football fans are also taking a keener interest in football docuseries’ such as ‘Sunderland ‘Til I Die’ and Man City and Spurs’ ‘All or Nothing’ on Amazon as well as other football content such as podcasts (Copa90, 2019) which demonstrates a trend whereby sports consumers do not just want bitesize content, but storytelling and behind-the-scenes is becoming ever more desired.
However, it is not just the modern fan that wants more interactivity with their club, as the EFL surveyed around 30,000 of their mainly match going fanbase, of all ages; prominently between the ages 45 and 64, and they discovered that 89% of these supporters use at least one of their club’s own official channels to access post-match content (EFL, 2019). They also declared how key loyalty is to them and how they have a deep emotional and social connection to the club they support, which could be linked to cognitive involvement whereby supporters feel a necessity to purchase a sports product, and can be linked to Tsiotsou’s model of sport team loyalty (Tsiotsou, 2013)
In this blog we analysed the behaviour of football fans and sports consumers and how they all share one thing in common, wanting more interaction with their club and also a deeper social connection. Whether that being the modern fan wanting more content via social media as 17% of modern fans primary want for football is more sociability (Copa90, 2019) or 91% match going fans valuing the atmosphere inside the stadium as the most important factor of going to a football match (EFL, 2019). The main thing to take away is that all fans want social connections and increased interactivity within football.
