My Meeting with Manchester City F.C.
It suddenly dawns on me that I forgot to talk about one of the more interesting appointments I was able to set up here in the UK. 
One afternoon in a fit of pure folly, I tracked down the email address of a Marketing Exec of the Manchester City Football Club. To my extreme surprise and joy, Mr. H actually responded, saying he would love to meet with a North American MBA Student, and if I would be so kind as to provide a critical analysis of his Web site.
So last week, this American from Seattle headed over to SportCity Stadium to tell an Englishman how he could better market Football to Mancunians.
Some quick context: Manchester City is kind of like the Chicago White Sox (if you exclude the World Series this year). They are "Manchester's team" but play 2nd fiddle to the uber-popular Manchester United, much the same way the White Sox fall behind the Cubs. They have a shiny new stadium built in 2002 that increased capacity from 35,000 to 48,000.
When the stadium held 35,000 people, they sold out every match. Now attendance has risen to 42,000 per game, but that still leaves about 6,000 empty seats when they aren't playing Man Utd, Chelsea, Liverpool or Arsenal. So a couple of things struck me as odd - and it's probably just the difference between English and American marketing tactics.
First, I relayed a personal anecdote about having trouble finding the time of a game one night when I was trying to watch it on TV, so I asked where they advertise. I was surprised to hear a response of, "Well, we don't need to advertise, since everyone knows when the games are." Maybe that's fair. I know the Seahawks play on Sundays and someone will tell me what time, so maybe that's applicable. Except, oh yeah, Man City plays EPL games between Thursday and Monday, depending on when Sky Sports wants to televise the games. And the Carling Cup matches are on Tuesday or Wednesday every 3 weeks or so. So you pretty much need to hook a palm pilot up to the web site to keep track of when the games are. But it shows the attitude of marketing football in England, "Everyone knows when the games are, so why do we need to bother?"
One very cool system they have instituted is the "City Card." This is not (as I assumed) a credit card. If you are a Man City supporter, you buy this card for a pound or so. You give them all of your personal data (email, Mobile SMS, etc...) and attach a credit card to the account, so when you buy tickets, they just tell the database where your seats are. So you don't actually ever receive printed tickets anymore. You simply run your card through the scanner at the gate. They set this system up 3 years ago and are able to track all the demographics and buying behaviors of their fans over 20+ home games a year.
Now, I want you to read that last sentence again and do a personality test.
If you felt a tingle down your spine, and your brain suddenly converted into an abacus calculating, "42,000 x 20 = 840,000 fans per year x 3 years = 2.5 million customer records..." then you my friend are a marketer.
2.5 million customer records! Some of you are now falling over yourselves trying to find a whiteboard to release the geyser of ideas of what you would do if you had a database that not only tracks when your customers like to go to games, but where they like to sit, how much they'll spend and how to contact them via SMS if there are empty seats for a game that fits these parameters. I can feel the energy from here as your hands quiver with excitement of ideas of how to segment the data. And now I'm going to tell you what Man City does with this data.
Nothing.
They're "looking into it and doing a little number crunching at this time."
I know, it's as if someone just shot your dog, isn't it? It's like putting the Mona Lisa at the end of a 100 ft hallway without any lights. You know it's there, but you just can't appreciate it.
After I regained my composure and picked up all the furnitutre I had thrown at Mr. H, we talked about some other ticket pricing schemes. The EPL is not unlike American Sports, in that they've priced themselves right out of the family market. For obvious reasons, they've controlled the hooligan aspect of the game, while simultaneously raising ticket prices into the executive class to match the free spending clubs of Chelsea, Arsenal et all. So, now you have a stadium full of corporate types, some lifelong fans who can't afford to keep their tickets and growing unrest from those who say the games don't have the same excitement. In a nutshell, it's now the NBA.
And so incredulously I listened to Mr. H lament about not really having a way to segment his fan base and send them unique, nearly personalized offers that would help solve this problem. (Thankfully, the team was at home, so the club doctor was able to surgically repair my tongue when I had bitten all the way through it.)
Final thought that will amuse you. I assumed that there was no instant replay screen because of an EPL regulation. But in fact, when they spent their $100 million on the new stadium, they couldn't get a sponsor for a video screen and decided the additional $1 million was too much. So in a sport with 1-2 goals a game total, you have no replays in the stadium, but 42 seperate camera angles if you watch it in a bar.
Anyway, interesting differences between UK and American Marketing. It will be interesting to see what the Glazer family does over at Man United.
One afternoon in a fit of pure folly, I tracked down the email address of a Marketing Exec of the Manchester City Football Club. To my extreme surprise and joy, Mr. H actually responded, saying he would love to meet with a North American MBA Student, and if I would be so kind as to provide a critical analysis of his Web site.
So last week, this American from Seattle headed over to SportCity Stadium to tell an Englishman how he could better market Football to Mancunians.
Some quick context: Manchester City is kind of like the Chicago White Sox (if you exclude the World Series this year). They are "Manchester's team" but play 2nd fiddle to the uber-popular Manchester United, much the same way the White Sox fall behind the Cubs. They have a shiny new stadium built in 2002 that increased capacity from 35,000 to 48,000.
When the stadium held 35,000 people, they sold out every match. Now attendance has risen to 42,000 per game, but that still leaves about 6,000 empty seats when they aren't playing Man Utd, Chelsea, Liverpool or Arsenal. So a couple of things struck me as odd - and it's probably just the difference between English and American marketing tactics.
First, I relayed a personal anecdote about having trouble finding the time of a game one night when I was trying to watch it on TV, so I asked where they advertise. I was surprised to hear a response of, "Well, we don't need to advertise, since everyone knows when the games are." Maybe that's fair. I know the Seahawks play on Sundays and someone will tell me what time, so maybe that's applicable. Except, oh yeah, Man City plays EPL games between Thursday and Monday, depending on when Sky Sports wants to televise the games. And the Carling Cup matches are on Tuesday or Wednesday every 3 weeks or so. So you pretty much need to hook a palm pilot up to the web site to keep track of when the games are. But it shows the attitude of marketing football in England, "Everyone knows when the games are, so why do we need to bother?"
One very cool system they have instituted is the "City Card." This is not (as I assumed) a credit card. If you are a Man City supporter, you buy this card for a pound or so. You give them all of your personal data (email, Mobile SMS, etc...) and attach a credit card to the account, so when you buy tickets, they just tell the database where your seats are. So you don't actually ever receive printed tickets anymore. You simply run your card through the scanner at the gate. They set this system up 3 years ago and are able to track all the demographics and buying behaviors of their fans over 20+ home games a year.
Now, I want you to read that last sentence again and do a personality test.
If you felt a tingle down your spine, and your brain suddenly converted into an abacus calculating, "42,000 x 20 = 840,000 fans per year x 3 years = 2.5 million customer records..." then you my friend are a marketer.
2.5 million customer records! Some of you are now falling over yourselves trying to find a whiteboard to release the geyser of ideas of what you would do if you had a database that not only tracks when your customers like to go to games, but where they like to sit, how much they'll spend and how to contact them via SMS if there are empty seats for a game that fits these parameters. I can feel the energy from here as your hands quiver with excitement of ideas of how to segment the data. And now I'm going to tell you what Man City does with this data.
Nothing.
They're "looking into it and doing a little number crunching at this time."
I know, it's as if someone just shot your dog, isn't it? It's like putting the Mona Lisa at the end of a 100 ft hallway without any lights. You know it's there, but you just can't appreciate it.
After I regained my composure and picked up all the furnitutre I had thrown at Mr. H, we talked about some other ticket pricing schemes. The EPL is not unlike American Sports, in that they've priced themselves right out of the family market. For obvious reasons, they've controlled the hooligan aspect of the game, while simultaneously raising ticket prices into the executive class to match the free spending clubs of Chelsea, Arsenal et all. So, now you have a stadium full of corporate types, some lifelong fans who can't afford to keep their tickets and growing unrest from those who say the games don't have the same excitement. In a nutshell, it's now the NBA.
And so incredulously I listened to Mr. H lament about not really having a way to segment his fan base and send them unique, nearly personalized offers that would help solve this problem. (Thankfully, the team was at home, so the club doctor was able to surgically repair my tongue when I had bitten all the way through it.)
Final thought that will amuse you. I assumed that there was no instant replay screen because of an EPL regulation. But in fact, when they spent their $100 million on the new stadium, they couldn't get a sponsor for a video screen and decided the additional $1 million was too much. So in a sport with 1-2 goals a game total, you have no replays in the stadium, but 42 seperate camera angles if you watch it in a bar.
Anyway, interesting differences between UK and American Marketing. It will be interesting to see what the Glazer family does over at Man United.
posted by ABoyer at
4:04 AM
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