Perception is Everything

During one of my recent flick through my various social media streams, I caught sight of an item and an idea that has struck a chord. I am paraphrasing but the nub of the concept was that you may be judging your business differently to how your customer (or fan) sees it.

This can be tricky in the sporting context of course. On the field of play, you know your rivals. In a league format, you have it laid out for you every season. In the cups, you get drawn against someone and as such it’s all very obvious. There are also some geographic rivalries and others that are simply historic. For the team and its fans, you can therefore very easily define who is your rival and what is success (a Barca team that loses the league but beats Real twice in the league may not be so poorly judged by its fans!).

Equally, it is complicated by the fact that you may put in place amazing off the pitch infrastructure and outperform against your rivals but if your lose on the pitch then no one cares – and won’t even tweet about you let alone purchase merchandise.

The problem is though that your rivals are not just on the pitch – they exist away from where the magic happens and as an executive, you need to be benchmarking yourself as such.

My wife owns a fantastic handmade chocolate business (go on you know you want to buy some (www.choconchoc.co.uk) and a large part of the business is via a mail order website where it can build a repeatable and reliable customer base. Sure[MB1]  enough they have online rivals such as Hotel Chocolat but their performance as a mail order business is actually judged by Amazon rather than any chocolate business. 

Despite clearly signposting that everything is handmade to order and offering different speeds of delivery it would not be uncommon to see complaints based entirely on speed of delivery. I recall one instance when a late afternoon order was received requesting next day delivery. The complaint was then made by midday by the irate customer. The benchmark set by Amazon is such that we simply assume all mail order experiences should be the same. So whilst her direct rival is a chocolatier the perception of her business is impacted by a company which has no direct correlation to hers.

Sport has a similar issue. Whilst team or individual performance is critical one shouldn’t underestimate all the other things that impact how you are perceived.

Your online merchandise model will be judged alongside Amazon. Your ticketing solution is being judged against other systems – Oyster for London Transport, Apps for airlines etc. Your social media stream is being judged against the leading YouTubers and influencers and so on. 

The in-stadium experience (where you have direct control of the customer) is being judged against other comparable venues that are both unfair and fair. It’s being judged against the direct rivals such as the cinema, the pub, the home but also most other entertainment options. So yes, the mobile signal in your stadium or arena is being compared – perhaps unfairly – to the home, multi-screen broadband experience. The ticket holder might cut you some slack but the expectation is that if you want them to keep coming back they will want you to cater to their needs.

Sports executives should continue to seek improvement everywhere and look to judge themselves differently. They should also be challenging their suppliers who also sometimes rely too much on the passion of fans and their desire to return. The services being supplied to the sector need to keep up with how the life of the everyday man has transformed in the past ten years. 

As a Chelsea season ticket holder, there is not a game that goes by that I don’t hear fans complaining at the gates that the ticket system is useless. Clearly, Chelsea is not in the ticketing business but if a common interaction with the customer is one of ‘this doesn’t work’ then the poor performance of that service provider is negatively impacting how you are perceived. Of course, if they win the league the fans will forget about it for a while but when a bad season comes along these are all influencers on how people should spend their hard earned time and money.

Equally, if your social media strategy is off point then your wider community will go elsewhere – you may be in their feed still but engagement and interaction will drop off. A common selling point I hear in sports is the number of likes or app downloads but let’s face it if you have high downloads but poor utilisation you are still doing something wrong. Clearly, a sports organisation is not a social media business but if that is where you want to engage with your audience you must remember that you will be judged against not just your sporting peers but others who are providing content on the same platform.

It would therefore be interesting to see not which Premier League has the highest followings on social media but to see someone like Nielsen give an analysis about where these clubs sit in the wider entertainment bracket – both in terms of ‘likes’ and ‘followers’ but also in terms of how they have monetized that audience in comparison to their entertainment rivals.

At that point, there might be some interesting insights revealed and some cracks identified – or perhaps to see where sport is outperforming?