Originally posted in our Sports Marketing 2.0 community
Reading Seth Godin’s “Meatball Sundae” I was struck by Trend #10: the Shifts in Scarcity and Abundance
“…they were selling a meatball sundae. They tried to leverage one asset (a store which cost $18,000 a month in rent) instead of using the power of eBay and Amazon to leverage their real asset: ownership of the Long Tail, couple with the ability to curate the world’s largest collection of mystery books.”
I see a parallel between the bookstore and the sports stadium. Right now all of our sales resources are lined up in support of the stadium because that’s where we make all of our money today. But will this always be the case?
Our stadium welcomes 65,000 Colts fans on 10 Sundays each year. Our Website welcomed 8 million Colts fans last year. There are 55,000 Colts season ticket holders, but there are 10 million Americans who say the Colts are their favorite team. When sponsors think of the Colts they think of the stadium. They should be thinking about reaching our fan base.
Godin’s point is that most businesses have opportunities like these - ways to tap into the power of the Web to expand business; but he stresses the reason why many old line companies fail at new marketing:
New Marketing - whipped cream and a cherry on top - isn’t magical. What’s magical is what happens when an organization uses the new marketing to become something it never used to be - it’s not jus tthe marketing that’s transformed, but the entire organization.
You can become the right organization. You can align your organization from teh bottom up to sync with New Marketing, and you can transform your organization into one that thirves on the new rules.
We’ve got a lot of opportunity…and a lot of work to do.
Thank you for the insight! I love to hear about new media and its relationship with sports and marketing. One thing you didn bring up was how some coaches and fans are apprehensive to new media. Do apprehensions from staff members cause your organization to stay away from new media (the possibility of negative buzz, who will be responsible for maintaining, ect.)? At the college level, it certianly has an impact. Our coches have a lot of say as to what we do with new media. I was wondering what it was like at the pro level.
Yes. Our football leadership has a lot to say about what we can or cannot do online. Mostly I think our team doesn’t want to give opponents any locker room fodder. Still, Tony Dungy has a blog and it’s very popular.