5 Things We Learned from The Ultimate Fan Experience

Day two of Leaders Week saw two more sector-specific forums run back-to-back. The first, The Ultimate Fan Experience, examined the latest techniques for building fan engagement and delivering feel-good moments – inside and outside the venue – across the world of sport. With the help of Leaders’ man on the ground Andrew Serio, we bring you some of the standout insights.

1. Will you read this?

Ever wondered why LinkedIn keeps telling you your profile is 35% complete and perhaps you’d like to fill it in some more, when in fact you’ve completed more like 1%? It’s because LinkedIn understands behavioural economics, and you, like all of us, are a sucker. Kevin Brilliant, a behavioural scientist at the Chicago Bulls, knows this too. And he can join the dots with some fascinating explanations. LinkedIn’s prompting fibs are an example of ‘endowed progress’. There is little more motivating than believing you’re progressing. There’s a link to sport here, bear with us. Partner offers to the Bulls fanbase perform far better when that fanbase is made to feel like they’ve progressed to a point where they feel like they deserve the offer. The exact same partner offer – a discount from a hotel brand – when put to a golfing audience performed far better than when it was offered out to Bulls fans. The reason? The golfers had to make a putt to ‘qualify’ for the offer. Something isn’t ‘too good to be true’ if you feel like you’ve worked to be offered it.

2. Tell me what you want, what you really, really want

Delivering on a fan experience requires, well, being able to capture, understand, and respond to what fans desire in those experiences. The Milwaukee Bucks, The Jockey Club, and Surrey County Cricket Club all take innovative approaches to engaging with their fans around their venue experience (anyone up for reviewing the Bucks’ bathrooms? Someone’s got to do it…), leading to some interesting results: “funky food and pop concerts for the youngsters” at Cheltenham, paperless tickets in Milwaukee, and an 8.2 customer experience rating at The Oval. Message it correctly, and even those “high-spending” customers, as one polite audience member described the older generation among us, will get on board.

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3. Will this content help me sell tickets?

For a man who is no fan of a supporter Q&A day, Bart Wiley, COO of the Seattle Sounders, it certainly spends a lot of time thinking about his club’s fans. He acknowledges that allowing “fans to hold the club accountable for being good stewards of the brand” is critical to providing next-level experiences. Those experiences include free merchandise for season ticket holders, voting rights over who should lead the club from a sporting side, and fan councils with management. A deep-dive fan survey by management consultancy BCG revealed some primary fan segments for the Sounders, and now all created content must answer to the ultimate question: “Will this content help us sell tickets?”

4. Best-in-class social, with a local spin

Closing today’s Ultimate Fan Experience sessions was Dewayne Hankins, CMO of the NBA’s Portland Trail Blazers. Standing between the crowd and happy hour, he delivered an insightful talk about the Blazers’ fan-first social strategy. Despite some brutal heartbreak in past seasons (passing on Jordan and Durant? Let’s move on), the team has been at the forefront of innovative fan engagement: a tie-in with HBO’s show, Portlandia? Check. Catchy marketing slogan (“Rip City”)? Check. A social media welcome for new signing, “Cash Considerations”? Check. When it comes to social, Hankins puts it best: “if you’re not thinking about mobile first, then you’re not doing it right.” Roger that.

5. A little more brilliance

Another nugget from the Chicago Bulls’ Kevin Brilliant, whose team likes to look at a “sports stadium as a living, breathing laboratory in which to understand human behaviour.” An example of that understanding: queuing happens at sports venues. It’s how you manage those queues that impacts the experience you offer. If you can reduce the time spent queuing, you’d think the experience would be improved. Not necessarily so. The data is clear: straight queues are 15% quicker than serpentine ones. But you’d be foolish to listen to the data on this one. Consumers far prefer a snaking line. The reason: choose a straight-line queue and the one next to you starts moving quicker as you go nowhere. At least it always feels like that. At least those are the only instances of linear queuing that really stick with you. There’s no winner here, and it’s an experience laced with, as Brilliant puts it, “regrets and counter-factuals.”