Who are our audiences?

Generally when we think about sports fans, the image that comes to mind is often of someone who is highly passionate and committed. It’s the extreme fan with painted face, lots of team merchandise and dedication to seeing every, if not as many, games possible.

But as I've indicated across a few posts, we know that sports consumers represent many diverse types of individuals, from casual viewers to die-hard fans.

Through our work, we've since identified 11 respective and unique segments that exist across the South Australian sports spectatorship market, split across non-Fan (5) and fan (6) - for confidential purposes, have not revealed these segments details. In doing so, we can now also clearly see and map these differing consumers across the fan development spectrum:

As I'd mentioned in a previous post, whilst the desire or intent might be to push as many people right (from fun, to centrality, to identity) as possible, for some audiences, the challenge and opportunity is less about doing that and more about maintaining consumption levels rather than trying to increase them.

With that, it’s worth pointing out when it comes to casual audiences, specifically those within the non-AFL fan segments, is the value and need to be kind to these less engaged audiences. We need to resist the temptation to dismiss them as ‘not true fans’. These audiences are critical to all sports brand's growth. Implementing key strategies and tools over time will help develop greater involvement and engagement from these key audiences.