Name an industry that receives free advertising every day in every newspaper in the country. Keep thinking? Here’s another clue: Do they have entire websites, radio shows, TV shows, and cable channels dedicated to talking about them and their product? Quit? 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 gear, and that’s mostly for “bragging rights.” Some of us may remember back in the 1990s when people played “grill leagues.” Today, ESPN, Yahoo, Sports Illustrated, CBS Sportsline, and others have very sophisticated online systems for managing leagues and getting information about their 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 making over $50,000 a year who spend over two hours a week playing these games, reading the ads and messaging your friends about sporting goods. Why are fantasy sports games so popular? Because we love sports and fantasy games feed love.
In 2004, the CBS and Fox networks spent a combined $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 being 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 connect emotionally 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, they 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 made. Thousands of hours are spent on these marketing plans, creating the right images, the right words, the right message, and the right media.
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 commercial where the baby was sitting inside the tire laughing and looking cute. She is not buying white wall radios, she is 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 prey on 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 greater the emotional bond that people have with a product, the better for us. But not all of us are going to be as successful at leveraging Joe Public’s emotion meter with our business idea as the NFL or the 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 the Pittsburgh Steelers?
Sorry to put it this way, but you probably won’t. But on the plus side, if you can’t beat them, join them.
sell sports – Sports-related companies have a great advantage in their favor. You are already tapping into an emotional vibration that is deep-seated 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 some avenues in sports-related businesses to tap into this fervor.
Most of us don’t have $700 million sitting around to buy the next NFL franchise to come up for sale. We need to reach some ripe 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 market for sports tickets 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 scalpers and making flippers, Carlton Sheets would be flipping burgers.
Not all tickets have a worthy 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 novice or intermediate in the secondary ticket market and prevent them from making costly mistakes and making 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 presale codes are valuable items. The cost of the course is usually recovered in a few transactions.
sports memorabilia – While we didn’t find any 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, shirts, 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
Football signed by Ben Roethlisberger $325
Football signed by David Carr $225
Not bad as a return for an investment of a buck and some postage. Start listing on eBay and you’re ready to go.
For market research, all you need to do is go to eBay and look at a few listings.
The perfect business will tap into people’s emotions to remove price from the equation as much as possible. Sport has achieved this goal. Anything that has 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.
