Features

The age of privacy was declared over as long ago as 2010, when Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg asserted that online confidentiality was so no longer a “social norm”.

Ever since the early years of the postal system, when letters were routinely opened in transit, the information we communicate to others – and the way in which the recipients handle it – has posed a threat to individual privacy. The introduction of successive technologies, from the telegram and the telephone to e-mail and social media, has only created a whole new set of risks each time.

Sport has one major advantage over other businesses when it comes to customers’ willingness to share – the connection fans feel with their club is considered to make them more favourably disposed towards helping their favourite team if they ask them for opinion or information.

With sports teams becoming less able to rely on blind loyalty to procure data from fans, the question is shifting from whether customers should be offered an incentive to provide personal information to what form that incentive should take.

The most popular incentive for information sharing identified by the CAB was the loyalty scheme, a method that has been helping UK horseracing venue operator Jockey Club Racecourses (JCR) understand more about their customers since 2011.

Nowhere do sports organisations get closer to their customers than in the stadium on a matchday – yet, arguably, nowhere do they know less about them.

The information data-driven sports organisations typically attempt to capture from fans at an event can broadly be characterised as one of four types: transactional, locational, behavioural and attitudinal.

In 2013, the NFL (National Football League) produced a set of minimum standards for stadium connectivity across the league. This was in response to four successive years of attendance decline between 2008 and 2011 and in an effort to offer spectators access to the new media content that significantly upgraded the in-home viewing experience over the same period.

The single biggest carrot for teams and venues to dangle in front of spectators when it comes to data sharing is fast, reliable access to the mobile internet.

The Norwegian Professional Football League (NPFL) has spent the last three years working with technology company Cisco to develop a collaborative model of fan data capture and analysis based on a countrywide network of Wi-Fi-enabled stadia.

Knowledge they say is power, and the intelligence of big data is already strengthening the arm of businesses as they wrestles with consumers to extract the maximum value possible from each and every transaction.

Advice around approaches to segmentation typically follows the playbook of big data analysis more widely: start small, scale up and focus on the markers and differentiators that are most relevant to your objectives.

Once the analysis process has produced some relevant customer segments to work with, the second phase of the process is to integrate that information with the insights and actions being developed alongside.

The 2015 UEFA Champions League semi-finals presented an opportunity to enhance customer datasets by adding social media activity generated around the matches.

The Rugby Football League (RFL), the governing body of the sport in England, has been developing a data-driven approach to its commercial and marketing activities over the past five years and focuses much of its CRM attention on building a single view of its customers from a wide range of touchpoints. These include ticket buying, volunteering, local club play and coaching.

Over the past 20 years, communicating with sports fans has become easier through multi-channel TV, the internet, social media and smartphone technologies. These platforms have given clubs and properties an always-on connection to their supporter base, and extended their reach to global scale.