Kevin Harrington // marketing // blog

Reading Rockets

Reading Rockets have set a fine example to sports clubs with their recent marketing activity. Via local schools they distributed flyers for a home match that gave the pupils free tickets. Accompanying adults got a £1 discount against the full £7 regular tariff.

Basketball is a bit of a minority sport and I expect their budgets are pretty tight. This campaign gave them a free distribution route for their message.

The really clever bit though is this: if there had been the same offer in the local paper it would have been ignored by us. This mechanic delivered pester power, tickets and information in our hand and all delivered by a trusted third party.

Now, as they had empty seats there, all the extra visitors were incremental revenue.

And from a personal point of view the best thing of all was it was really good family fun. Unlike football matches the language was clean throughout. It was fast paced with music and commentary. And Reading Rockets won their 20th consecutive match against Bristol Academy Flyers.

What’s going to happen to sport in 2009? It seems that a lot of businesses will not be renewing their sponsorship of tournaments, teams and individual sports and men and women. I also expect that paying audiences at events will decline in 2009. Therefore there will be major reductions in revenue.

Logic says that the affected sports businesses will have to reduce their costs and/or market their businesses to grow income.

Reducing costs could be painful. Premiership footballers earning less is a possibility; and it has to be said they could probably survive at slightly lower income levels. But many of the infrastructure costs will be difiicult to shave in the short term.

Therefore marketing to gain more income seems an attractive alternative. And I can’t help thinking that this might not be too difficult. I’ve just tried to find the fixture information for a couple of rugby teams and it has been very hard work. So it was a pleasure to discover a gem of a rugby team website, London Wasps, who have done a marvelous job of providing relevant information in an easy way to find.

Perhaps if more sports businesses could follow this example they could see better gates. As a minimum fixture information should be easy to find and tickets easy to buy.