Riverhounds go Back to Their Roots
Riverhounds Future
The Pittsburgh Riverhounds offer a unique liminal experience for its patrons. It’s a professional sports team that feels like a local community. The players are all about giving back to the fans, and the games don’t have that uptight feeling. It’s just a fun and inexpensive night out. This uniqueness allows for their fans and supporters to feel special and valued when at a game. They even have sideline seats that aren’t offered at these major professional games. The entire experience is catered towards the fans. In my experience, the turnout of kids at these games is a major key selling point for the Hounds. I think the idea of grassroots marketing would best suit their product. They need to interact and show their support to local teams and schools in comment sections or DM’s.
Grassroots Marketing Approach
Grassroots marketing is selling your product through building a rapport within your community. Chron states that grassroots marketing “features low-cost and free campaigns, such as posting on social media or message boards, holding giveaways and contests and other low-cost efforts.” You start at the source and build a host of young fans that will continuously support you throughout their life. From there they will raise another generation of fans. This stems from the idea that you can create lifelong fans. For example, a dad gets four free tickets to a hounds’ game through a giveaway we do. He takes his wife and two kids. Those two kids have such a great time that they want to go back. The dad sees the tickets are cheap and decides he’s going to make it a family tradition that they go to at least four hounds’ games a season because of how much their kids love it. Those kids grow up and continue this tradition with their kids, and maybe the cycle repeats again and again. Now, if you do that with just 10 families, you’ve sold 40 tickets a game for 20-30 years. This is of course the low end of GRM but the sentiment remains that it is a great way to market their cheaper product that doesn’t get as much ticket sales to games.
The target market for the hounds’ is primarily kids and parents. Parents aren’t dragging their kids to games so it’s best to market towards the kids because they will be asking their parents to buy them tickets. “Similarly, kids also play a powerful role in parents’ decisions to go to events/outings (65%)” (YouGov) Getting our name out there through community outreach is the first step to having this approach work. Shouting out local school teams on their accomplishments, having players interact with the student-athletes, do special training sessions with them and posting the highlights to social media are all new ways of gaining positive media attention. However, people want to see action with the social media presence. They want a team that is going to walk the talk and actually go the extra mile. In order to do this the Riverhounds could have school’s honored before the game, devote an entire halftime to youth teams coming onto the field and playing, or host other attractions that will get people interested. The Riverhounds don’t have the draw that some other sport teams do because they aren’t viewed as a professional team/league. This prohibits them from going down the Savannah Banana’s route to getting new fans.
The Savannah Banana’s Route
The Savannah Banana’s are a semi-professional baseball team in Georgia. Because they aren’t a professional baseball team and their players aren’t as good, they have to find new and intriguing ways to market their product. They decided to treat it as an entertainment industry rather than a professional sport. They changed the rules, presentation, and entire premise of baseball in order to make their product more digestible and sought-after. And it worked. They have sold out of almost all of their games and are raising ticket prices through the roof because of this success.
The Riverhounds cannot change the rules of soccer because they are still in a competitive and professional league. They have to rely on their product being something that people want to watch. Our goal is to create hype and drive someone to buy tickets. Brand ambassadors would help this.
This chart shows the domestic success that the Banana’s have had
Brand Ambassador Possibility
“A brand ambassador is a brand advocate formally recognized and appointed by the brand as a representative.” (Per Duel ) Noah Beck is famous for his viral TikTok videos and being a prominent social media influencer. He also has a deep history player soccer and was pretty good. However, there is a reason why he’s no longer playing. Giving him a multiple game trial and announcing it through social media would exponentially improve both in person ticket sales and eyes on our product. There are risks to this idea. It could ruin the integrity of the team. Players that have been with the team for years would feel disrespected when someone who hasn’t earned a spot gets signed and takes minutes away from them. It might also be a seen as a ploy for marketing and cause the fans to boycott. I think we would have fans traveling from all over the country to come watch him play. The possibility that he brings his famous influencer friends and associates to a game to watch him play would be too much for the fans to pass up. If him playing for the team is too much of a reach, he can just be a sponsored ambassador through an ad he posts on his TikTok. This is a use of influencer marketing. “Influencer marketing is a collaboration between popular social-media users and brands to promote brands’ products or services.” (Mckinsey) Using this technique the Riverhounds will be able to market their product to younger audiences and get new eyes on their product.