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April 21, 2023

Editor Note: Adam Grossman takes the controls on Friday mornings. You will find his latest Revenue Above Replacement column is below. I'll be back on Monday. Have a great weekend.

Secondary Fans Should Be A Primary Consideration

Sports organizations seeking to grow their fanbase would be wise to develop a strategy targeting 'secondary fans'.

The Kansas City Chiefs have identified

secondary

 fans as “people who primarily root for a different team, but might have something of a soft spot for the Chiefs.”

The reigning Super Bowl Champions will use next weekend’s NFL Draft, which is set to take place in the downtown area surrounding Union Station Kansas City and the National WWI Museum and Memorial, as an opportunity to do just that. The Chiefs plan to have a 100x100 activation zone, featuring a double-decker replica of the bus used during the team's most recent Super Bowl parade, at the league-run event. 

“There’s a lot of reasons for people to become fans of a team, and those who might be willing to bring another team into their mindshare, we want to take advantage of that,” Lara Krug (EVP and chief marketing officer, Kansas City Chiefs) said.

The Chiefs are seemingly in a unique position to take advantage of fan “mindshare” opportunities. The franchise has participated in three of the last four Super Bowls (winning twice) and features league MVP Patrick Mahomes.

Winning, along with having star players, can be helpful in targeting secondary fans as it gives the organization the opportunity to reach audiences through channels such as national/globally broadcasted games and increased media coverage (think: SportsCenter or sports talk radio shows).  

But it not a requirement to pursue the strategy. 

As previously discussed, on-field performance is both difficult to

predict

and

maintain

on a year-to-year basis. To find long-term fan engagement success (both for primary and secondary fans), teams must develop strategies capable of retaining mindshare over time.

One immediate way for a club to find secondary fans is to look directly within its home market. A substantial number of fans (typically at least a double digit percentage) do not live in the same city as their favorite team.

Clubs can use data-driven approaches to identify those individuals. For example, they can look at internal ticket sales data as an indicator (i.e. people buying tickets for the same one opponent every year).

Teams can also rely on first or third party social media data to create geographic fan profiles (think: examining fan locations from public user profiles).

Of course, combining multiple data sources together is the best approach.

There is a reason we have focused on the local market. Professional sports leagues tend to have rules in place that prevent teams from soliciting fans outside of their defined geographic territory. Generally speaking, they do not want clubs competing against one another for revenues and interest. 

However, that kind of zero-sum logic is not fully applicable in this context because targeting secondary fans should often lead to a net increase in sports consumption.

For example, a fan that supports just one team may stop following part way through a poor season.

By contrast, a secondary fan will “hedge” against his/her team having a bad season by following another club too (it is less likely that both teams will have bad seasons). That individual is now more likely to watch games, purchase tickets, participate in sponsorship activations and events, buy merchandise, etc. later into a season even if their primary team is having a bad year.

Considering teams collectively share many of those revenue streams, a franchise can benefit even if one of its primary fans adds a secondary team. Revenue sharing is also a core reason teams in the same league prioritize the dissemination of best practices. The NBA has specifically created a Team Marketing & Business Operations (TMBO) in-house consulting group to assist in this effort.

The Chiefs activations at the NFL Draft will be the latest example of a secondary fan engagement strategy. However, it will not be the last time that a team employs this approach.

About the Author: Adam Grossman is the Vice President of Business Insights & Analytics at Excel Sports Management. He works with companies, sports properties, media rights holders, athletes, agencies, and events to determine the value of their most important assets. Grossman is also a professor at Northwestern University Master’s In Sports Administration program and the co-author of The Sports Strategist: Developing Leaders for a High-Performance Industry. You can find him at [email protected].