Monthly Archives: August 2011

Market Penetration, Organization Effectiveness, Technology/Sports Equation

Building Bridges from Tech to Sports Industries

Since 2003, magnified by our presence in Silicon Valley, my partners and I have been retained by Boards, venture capital and angel investors, founders and CEOs of early stage tech companies seeking our guidance and assistance to gain footholds in the sports industry or with sports fans/consumers.

They have run the gamut from mobile, tablet and/or web apps to game and software development companies as well as WiFi and online loyalty/retention platform ventures.

Also, because of my experience as the CMO of an online K-8 education and professional development company, organizations developing hardware and software for the digital classroom and home schooling have also sought us out.

Our roles have been both strategic and operating in nature, being engaged as interim operating executives spearheading business development, product development, sales and brand building/public relations functions. We have also augmented the credibility and depth of senior management teams in their capital raising efforts.

Because of our wide reaching understanding of the inner workings of sports entities and sports fans (we have interviewed more than 850,000 of the latter), we assist our clients by helping them understand and  capitalize on

  • How, when leagues and teams make decisions
  • What motivates innovation
  • Variations in risk tolerance
  • Who are the leaders and followers
  • Behavior and attitudes of fan segments
  • How performance economics influence decisions
  • How to approach different sports and management levels
  • How to gain buy-in, overcome barriers
  • Sensitivity to implementation issues

 

Innovations, Organization Effectiveness, Product Development, Technology/Sports Equation

Creating Competitive Advantage with our Software Systems

George Steinbrenner (Owner – New York Yankees) . . . in the bowels of Yankee Stadium, having secured buy-in from key executives of the club to purchase our EDGE 1.000 performance tracking and data base management system, two colleagues (Tom Black, Don Leopold) and I presented the system to Steinbrenner for final approval.

He interrupted my opening comments, pulled out an envelope with ten handwritten questions on it regarding our system, saying the Yankees would buy it if I answered “yes” to all ten.  I answered “yes” to the first nine, and “no, but . . .” to the last. He smiled at me, turned to his VP Finance, said “buy it”, then abruptly stood up and left the room, others following in his wake.

Side-stepping its telecast and radio broadcast benefits, the Yankees focused on our system’s performance management elements and tools – game tactics planning, player performance evaluation, amateur/professional scouting data base management,  draft/free agent selection and trade planning.

New Revenue, Technology/Sports Equation, Work in Process

Jump Starting Your Data Base

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The pro and amateur sports and live entertainment worlds and their tangents that sell tickets (primary and secondary markets), merchandise and travel/hospitality are sitting atop data bases that are puritanically protected, single-mindedly commercialized and inattentively allowed to go fallow. 

Enter a platform that respects the core sales priorities of the data base owner . . .  but motivates increased engagement 24 x 7, reducing defection/ratcheting retention,  and creates incremental earnings opportunities for the data base owner through both transaction commissions stemming from the day-to-day buying and non-buying activities of people in the data base and increased value for sponsors through new, measurable activation benefits. And all of this can be accomplished without adding staff or marketing expense.

Enter our client which has built a powerful technology platform and attracted a universe of partners that reads like a VIP invitation list to a regency rally for the nation’s leading traffic engines, e.g.,  Amazon.com, Apple iTunes, Best Buy,  DirecTV, Disney Stores, Macy’s, Nordstroms, Safeway, Target and others

We will be the business development bridge between our client, companies like these examples above and the sports/entertainment worlds.

Innovations, Technology/Sports Equation

The Inspiration of Steve Jobs

“Find What You Love,” by Steve Jobs at Stanford University 2005 Commencement

I have never met Steve Jobs, but he has had an important impact on my life and career. Elsewhere in this blog you can read about my affinity for the nexus of technology and sport which was bred of the open hand Apple extended to me and my associates 30 years ago when we had the then crazy notion of gathering pitch-by-pitch details of Major League Baseball games to provide broadcasters with enriched commentary texture and baseball operations decision makers with insights to improve game tactics planning and player performance analysis.(ML)

Jobs, who stepped down as CEO of Apple yesterday, Wednesday, August 24, 2011, after having been on medical leave, reflected on his life, career and mortality in this commencement address at Stanford University in 2005.  Read it. Breathe it. And hold it close. . .

 

I am honored to be with you today at your commencement from one of the finest universities in the world. I never graduated from college. Truth be told, this is the closest I’ve ever gotten to a college graduation. Today I want to tell you three stories from my life. That’s it. No big deal. Just three stories. The first story is about connecting the dots. Continue reading The Inspiration of Steve Jobs →

Branding, Market Penetration, Market Research, Product Development

Birthing the San Jose Sharks

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Art Savage  retained me five months before the National Hockey League granted Bay Area expansion rights to George and Gordon Gund(shown here). The first CEO of the new club, initially dubbed “Bay Area Hockey ’91”, Savage asked me to craft the new franchise’s overall business plan, organization/ staffing plan, marketing/sales plan (including naming the team and designing its logo family) and week-by-week launch countdown for what became the San Jose Sharks.

Upon completion, he hired me as employee #2 to become the EVP Business Operations, overseeing all revenue streams (tickets, premium seating/suites, sponsorships and merchandise), TV and radio production, community development, advertising/ promotion and media development.

The role also included defining the culture and values of the young entity, ensuring they were synchronized with those of ownership and the marketplace.

We gained an in-depth understanding of the market and its segmentation over a 15-week period with a comprehensive mix of marketing research activity that included 32 focus groups that I moderated, “crowd group” concept testing, executive interviews with corporate and affinity group targets by phone and a global team naming sweepstakes, carrying out $350,000 worth of work for $45,000 out-of-pocket.

Having to launch the franchise twice, once in 1991 at the Cow Palace in Daly City, 40 miles north of San Jose, and two years later in San Jose when the city’s new downtown arena was completed, understanding attitudes influenced by geography and distance as well as familiarity with and interest in hockey was paramount.

Branding, Innovations, Market Penetration, Organization Effectiveness, Technology/Sports Equation

Marketing to Teens with our Music Video

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Commissioned by NBA Commissioner  David Stern,  Bob Brand and I conceived a way for the NBA to engage its teen age fans in their mid-80s idiom, the music video.

Irving Azoff, then president of MCA Records, now Executive Chairman of Live Nation Entertainment, agreed to provide 85% of the funding for the unprecedented collaboration, featuring their hot new group sensation, The New Edition.

Stern, who had signed off on the concept for the NBA and agreed to pick up the 15% balance if we found the partner and the appropriate talent then ensured our access to an NBA arena, in-game and post game, and paved the way to CBS Sports who produced a “making of the video” for halftime of one of its NBA finals telecasts.

From an organization point-of-view, this is a good example of how imaginative league leadership, an individual franchise owner (in this case, Dr. Jerry Buss), an entertainment industry partner and a firm like ours playing a producer/director/creator role can can introduce successful innovation.

Branding, Innovations, Organization Effectiveness, Product Development, Technology/Sports Equation

Spawning a Baseball Tech Breakthrough

Roy Eisenhardt (President/CEO – Oakland A’s) . . . In 1980, leading Major League Baseball into a new technology-enabled age, hired my company’s STATS, Inc. subsidiary (Sports Team Analysis & Tracking Systems), co-owned with Dr. Richard Cramer, noted Sabermetrician,  to develop EDGE 1.000 ™. Eisenhardt made it clear from the outset that he wanted to increase radio and TV ratings, the enjoyment of fans and the value of the broadcasts to advertisers.

This was the first computerized pitch-by-pitch and pitcher/batter/fielder tendencies information gathered in real time for the purpose of player performance evaluation, game tactics planning and the statistical enrichment of play-by-play radio and TV broadcasts (Apple, provided the development hardware which also included Hayes modems, a DEC mainframe and a Corvus hard drive) . Jay Alves, now an executive with the Colorado Rockies, was recruited to be the first system operator.

We also worked closely with the broadcasters, Bill King and Lon Simmons, to increase their comfort levels with the rapidly updating statistical and trends texture they now had displayed in front of them.

Our EDGE 1.000 provided the initial analytical underpinnings of the A’s amateur player evaluation and drafting process fostered by Sandy Alderson, then Billy Beane and since popularized in the book, Moneyball, by Michael Lewis. The movie version of Moneyball, with Brad Pitt, opens in late 2011.

For the subsequent two decades, the brand image and reputation of the Oakland A’s as well as the confidence instilled in fans would be influenced and shaped by the innovative bent of the Haas family ownership.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Branding, Market Research, New Revenue

Defending Brand Equity through Litigation

When the National Football League retained me in the late 1990s as an expert defense witness in its extended litigation regarding intellectual property, licensing and marketing best practices issues with the Oakland Raiders, Holly House (Anti-trust and general litigator with Bingham McCutchen LLC) was my point person in the process which lasted into the early 2000s and resulted in  a positive outcome for the NFL. It was good to have her on our side of the table.

My work in the case was to build analytical support of NFL defense arguments as well as to draw on my consumer packaged goods, retailing and licensed goods experience when dissecting the assumptions and forecasts being mounted by the high-powered and court savvy expert witnesses retained by the opposition.  Because the proceedings lasted as long as they did I was deposed on two occasions, approximately four years apart.

Litigation support and preparing for expert witness testimony are demanding disciplines, not always leading to winning outcomes. Fortunately, working with highly competent litigators in behalf of leagues and sporting goods companies, I have a highly respectable batting average.

This was not only a case of protecting NFL assets, their intellectual property and trademarks, but about protecting the revenue streams that flowed from them.

Market Penetration, Market Research, Marketing, Pricing

The Arts can Inform Sports Marketing

Boards of cultural institutions from coast-to-coast have asked for insights to help drive attendance, subscriptions/plans and contributions, leading to having assisted museums, theatre/repertory groups, opera companies and symphonies.

Usually, the learning highway runs from sports & live entertainment to the arts groups. But the art of arts marketing is becoming increasingly sophisticated.

We helped one long-standing musical theatre organization better understand its own market segmentation so that it could increase the appeal of its show offerings and the effectiveness of its marketing programming/message persuasiveness and get more pop for its always constrained resources.

Drawing on a battery of focus groups and audience surveys we conducted, the following segmentation was developed and embraced.

Heydays . . . These were patrons introduced to musical theatre during the 40s through 60s. They enjoy seeing the great shows of that Golden Age. These might include Sound of Music, Fiddler on the Roof and My Fair Lady.

Experientials . . . These patrons were drawn to the downtown, enjoying the 360º experience – “dinner and a show” at an affordable price.  They look for quality, appreciate convenience and reasonable pricing. Their interest is not tied to a particular show but respond to valued added experiences.

Escapists . . . These patrons seek relief from day-to-day demands.  They like memorable music, high energy dance, shows that fill the theatre and predictable plots. Shows they enjoy include 42nd Street, A Chorus Line, Evita, Les Misrables and West Side Story.

There are two sub-segments that flow from the first three . . .

Melodics . . . This group is comprised of a broad range of individuals whose love for musical theatre stems from a positive, early life experience with music. Many were introduced to musical theatre by their parents.

Loyalists . . . This group is very supportive of the theatre company and its long term audience growth challenges, even though they may not like the “risky” shows periodically produced to attract a new audience. It always finds something to like about each show.

Capitalizing on insights like these increases productivity and results. Count on it.

 

 

Branding, Product Development

Design as a Value in Brand Building

During the the launch of the San Jose Sharks in the early 90s, graphics excellence was highly valued, from the design of the original logos and uniforms, collateral materials and game staging production values (including the iconic Shark Head Tunnel) to commissioned art employed on game magazine covers and retained as part of the franchise’s private collection and heritage. Among the stable of almost 20 graphic artists and illustrators recruited to execute this commitment, five stand out. Continue reading Design as a Value in Brand Building →