Put pretty simply, and denigrating my career to a future-salary-impeding level, Marketing is a function that tries to make people do certain stuff.
You can dress it up all you like – engagement, branding, digital, social etc. But at the end of the day I’m sat here at my laptop trying to come up with ways of making more people buy more of the stuff that we sell. That’s the big goal. And on the way to that there are loads of little goals – make people feel more engaged with our brand, make people read our sales literature, make people follow us on Twitter and so on.
Even this blog is designed to make you think I’m less of a clueless clown if you actually meet me. Not sure it’s too successful on that score, but never mind.
Anyway, as part of this whole “making people do stuff” extravaganza, I’m starting to become increasingly obsessed with a marketing tactic known as Gamification. This is the superbly wanky marketing term for adding game mechanics to products, services and the marketing journey as a whole.
We’ve reached a point with Gamification whereby it is very firmly entering the conscientiousness of marketers in all sectors. Hell, even us B2b cavemen are thinking about it more and more.
So, how have gaming mechanics manifested themselves in marketing? Collection, achievement, levelling up, rewards and customisation are just some of the techniques that you’ll see across a number of sectors.
But I’ve yet to see too much evidence of its use in football. So, how could football clubs better use Gamification to engage and excite their fans. A few thoughts:
-
1 – Audit your interactions
A football club and its fans have dozens of different types of interaction. From visiting the stadium on match day, to liking the official Facebook page or buying merchandise. Every single interaction can be used in a Gamification context – but only if you have them all mapped out and know how they all fit into each other.
-
2 – Reward loyalty (properly)
Richard Ayers, the Head of Digital for Manchester City, recently said – “With lots of clubs, you devote your life and give money for season tickets and get back the right to buy more shirts”
I couldn’t have put this better. Loyalty of fans is too often assumed, and too often used as a commercial lever.
So, here is a thing – by mapping out the interactions your fans have with you, you can get a feel for how they contribute to “loyalty” and you can reward this appropriately. If you add a game layer by ACTUALLY OFFERING PROPER REWARDS THAT PEOPLE WANT, you’ll be able to encourage the right kind of interactions.
-
3 – Bridge online and offline behaviour
Every other industry is starting to understand how online and offline behaviour interacts. How the online research can lead to offline purchase, or vice versa. Brands use online channels to monitor chatter, assess feedback and even handle complaints about offline purchases.
I see very, very little on this in the world of football. Only this week the sports marketing world was getting excited that Valencia used their Twitter handle on the front of their shirts where the sponsor’s name usually is.
So, why not try bringing all of this activity together? Do clubs have their fans’ social profiles mapped to season ticket data?
Do they reward the guy who is sharing photos, liking, retweeting and then turning up to his seat on a saturday afternoon? Do they know he’s unhappy with his subscription to the premium club website? Well – he’s told all of this friends and followers, so why not?
Lots of modern CRM systems allow for this kind of social profiling and interaction. Check this from Salesforce.. It has to be possible with a football club, surely.
-
4 – Enlist fans to engage with other fans (and then reward them)
A popular Gamification technique is that of adding rewards and bonuses for referrals. This should work perfectly in a football environment. It could be something along the lines of a simple recommend-a-friend bonus. Or more complex like group-buying discounts. But the fact is that the fans are the best recruiters a club could ever have.
And as games get more expensive to attend, the dad-to-son vertical model of recruitment may be less reliable and peer-to-peer horizontal model will become more important. This kind of thing could work on a game-by-game, competition-by-competition or seasonal basis if done correctly.
A lot of this is basic CRM stuff. And I know that clubs need to get that bit right before they can really add a game layer.
But I’d love to log in to my club website using my Facebook profile, and on that have a personal profile page with all of the stuff that I’d done.
Think about how LinkedIn encourages you to complete your professional profile. Well, why can’t my club do that for me? Why can’t it try to get me more engaged by showing me the level of my interactions and letting me share them with my social networks. Shame me about only going to 3 games in the last year. Give me credit for liking, sharing, subscribing, +1′ing, retweeting and embedding. And give me a pat on the back for sharing my engagement with my friends and followers.
Only then will it really be game on.
