Name an industry that receives free advertising every day in every newspaper in the country. Keep thinking? Here’s another hint: Do they have websites, radio shows, TV shows, and entire cable channels dedicated to talking about themselves and their product? Give up? The answer is sport.
What an amazing industry. Every morning, the Jerry Jones team has articles written about it. Free color images on the cover promoting his brand. Radio programs talking only about his product for hours and hours.
More than 30 million people play fantasy sports. The average player in fantasy sports spends about $110 a year on their fantasy teams, and that’s mostly for “bragging rights.” Some of us can remember back in the 1990’s when people played “steakhouse leagues.” Today, ESPN, Yahoo, Sports Illustrated, CBS Sportsline, and others have very sophisticated online systems for managing leagues and getting information about your team, players, and league standings.
They make a fortune on these sites from advertising because they know they have a market of men ages 18-50 who make over $50,000 a year and spend more than two hours a week playing these games, reading the ads, and sending messages to your friends about sporting goods. Why are fantasy sports games so popular? Because we love sports and fantasy games fuel the love.
In 2004, the CBS and Fox networks spent a total of $8 billion to broadcast NFL games over six years. In 1999, CBS spent $6 billion for the broadcast rights to the NCAA basketball tournament over 11 years. In 2006, Fox and TBS signed a combined $3 billion deal with MLB to broadcast a few games a week plus the postseason. In 2001, the NBA signed a six-year, $3.4 billion contract with Time Warner. Why are billions of dollars spent to broadcast sporting events? Because we love sports, they are making money filling that love.
You get the idea. Sport is part of our lives. We have an insatiable appetite for sports. We emotionally connect with players and teams. They are our role models. Entire cities shut down when a championship game is played or for the victory parade. Corporations invest millions and billions of dollars in sports-related media because they can get a return on that investment.
Sports Marketing – Tiger Woods, Lebron James, Michael Jordan and many others are not only great talents, but are the stars of carefully crafted marketing plans. These marketing plans are geared towards raising your profile, creating interest in the fan base, and expanding that fan base. This doesn’t happen just because Tiger is a nice guy. This happens because there are millions of dollars to be done. Thousands of hours are invested in these marketing plans, creating the right images, the right words, the right message, and the right medium of communication.
There is a more important point here: the business of sports has successfully harnessed our emotions and our lives in a way that no other business has.
marketing 101 – When we have read the countless books on sales and marketing, we learned that the best way to sell to a person is to tap into that person’s emotions. The ability to create a buyer’s emotional attachment to your product is priceless. Everyone remembers the tire ad where the baby was sitting inside the tire laughing and looking cute. She’s not buying white-walled radials, she’s buying protection for her children. No price is too high for that.
Wouldn’t it be great if we could create this kind of excitement for a furniture store? Imagine radio shows talking about trundle beds, reclining sofas, and trundle tables. Well, it’s hard to get excited about china cabinets the way we do about football, and we never will. The only things that take advantage of our minds like sports are politics and religion. Those will become controversial too quickly for the entrepreneur.
Back to the sale and our emotions. The more emotional attachment people have to a product, the better for us. But not all of us are going to be as successful tapping into Joe Public’s emotion meter with our business idea as the NFL or tire manufacturers. They have a huge head start and deeper pockets than the rest of us.
What should an entrepreneur do? How can you make people love your product as much as they love the Pittsburgh Steelers?
Sorry to put it this way, but you probably won’t. But on the bright side, if you can’t beat them, join them.
Sell Sports – Companies related to sports have a great advantage in their favor. You are already tapping into an emotional vibration that is deeply rooted and long lasting. There is no need to try to build that positive feeling. ESPN has taken care of that for us. All you need to do is find a few avenues in sports-related businesses to tap into this fervor.
Most of us don’t have 700 million sitting around buying the next NFL franchise to go on sale. We need to reach for some low-hanging fruit. Let’s consider a couple of business models that allow you to take advantage of the sports machine that has fewer barriers to entry.
Sports Tickets – The secondary sports ticket market is a $10 billion a year business. Many people reading this are going to say “ticket scalping.” We tell them that you are buying a limited supply of a product and reselling it on the open market to the highest bidder. Exactly how different is this from buying and selling houses? If we had the same moral outrage over ticket touts and pinballers, Carlton Sheets would be flipping burgers.
Not all tickets have a decent resale value. We need to separate the wheat from the chaff. We also need to know where to sell our wheat, metaphorically speaking. There are several places that offer quality education on how to break into this market. They will educate any newbie or intermediate to the secondary ticket market and prevent them from making costly mistakes and running profitable deals. Look for something that not only gives you an instruction manual, but also gives you information on how to proceed. Ticket sales dates and pre-sale codes are valuable items. The cost of the course is usually recouped in a few transactions.
sports memorabilia – While we didn’t find guides on the best ways to get into this business, there are some well-known techniques among sports collectors that can help you. Send balls, jerseys, photos to sports stars asking them to sign it. If you include a self-addressed return package, the chances of a player signing and returning it are increased.
Some eBay samples of sports memorabilia include:
Baseball signed by Mariano Rivera $230
Painting signed by Mariano Rivera $70
Chris Carpenter Signed Photo $139
Ben Roethlisberger Signed Football $325
David Carr Signed Football $225
Not bad as a return on an investment of a buck and some postage. Start listing on eBay and you’re good to go.
For market research, all you need to do is go to eBay and look at some postings.
The perfect business will tap into people’s emotions to take price out of the equation as much as possible. The sport has achieved this goal. Anything to do with sports will evoke passion in people. Too often, people’s ups and downs coincide with their favorite team. We leave the social comment on this to other posts. For us entrepreneurs, understanding this emotional bond allows us to find opportunities to capitalize on these markets.