There’s a reasonably good chance CRM mavens will face an interesting problem within a week: How can marketing mend a baseball fan’s broken heart?
Barring a settlement, on Aug. 30 the Major League Baseball season will prematurely end in a labor dispute. A few years ago I wrote a piece on how sports franchises, which excel at brand marketing but tend to fall down on customer relationship building, could keep their fan bases when their product – the players – was no longer available. Sadly, it looks like it’s time for a revisit.
Craig Wood, then with KnowledgeBase Marketing and now president of DIRECT’s research partner Yankelovich Inc.’s Monitor MindBase unit, once noted that the teams that have an ongoing dialog with fans before a strike will have the smallest attrition rates.
During the late 1990s, there was little indication that teams were communicating with their fans. As part of a group that buys tickets for a local team’s Saturday home games, I can personally attest that it still ain’t so. Actually, the only communication we’ve received from them recently was a request for playoff ticket money by Aug. 30 – the date of the potential strike. I’m hoping it was an unfortunate coincidence.
Regardless, my group, and thousands of valuable season ticket holders like us, are going to react badly to a strike. As John Sorrentino, vice president for ticket sales for the Houston Astros said about advance sales after the last shutdown was resolved, "People were just not responding. In a normal year you just send them an invoice and they send you a check. [After the strike] we had to send them an invoice and then call them three or four times."
Even so, the Astros lost nearly 2,000 regular season ticket holders, and it was only when several players made runs at records that fans throughout the country began to re-embrace the sport. In 2003 there will be fewer records being chased, and a lot more fans feeling burned.
During the 1998 National Basketball Association lockout, the league coordinated a Valentine’s Day card mailing, in which personally autographed cards were sent to season ticket holders. When the National Hockey League had a lockout that stopped its 1994-95 season, the San Jose Sharks contacted their ticket holders "by any means we had," according to Malcolm Bordelon, the executive vice president of business operations.
To Major League Baseball, I offer this unsolicited advice: Better be prepared to take a major expense on some highly personal marketing, boys. Your fan base is poorer and angrier now, and is going to need to see some serious love.
I’ll end by quoting Wood again: "The team that gets on top of [loyalty marketing efforts] will be the one that [has an edge in] the battle for entertainment dollars." Don’t know about you, but if the remainder of the 2002 season is cancelled, come 2003 my Yankee pin money is going into Harry Potter’s coffers.
To respond to the opinions in this column, please contact mailto:rlevey@primediabusiness.com
