mikedubc
Washington, DC
Male, 33
I'm the Director of Strategic Marketing of an NHL team. I focus on revenue generation and customer engagement via digital media. My expertise includes strategy, business development, mobile marketing and application design, CRM, online marketing and market research. Ask me anything.
Right now we focus a lot of our efforts on women, children, and more broadly, tech-savvy fans. Our female fan base has been growing immensely and we started a women's fan club to deliver to them specific content and events with a female viewpoint. Youth is a great segment to target to grow our fan base long-term. We have a kids club with tons of events and contests and also have a youth hockey initiative where we partner with local rinks and schools to increase the adoption of hockey in our area. And of course, we leverage technology for the tech-savvy crowd with mobile apps and social networks. It all comes down to knowing your customer base, identifying the trends, and delivering value to those segments.
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Absolutely not. The lockout in 2004-05 really hurt the sport but since then the NHL has seen growth in every business and competitive metric. There's little doubt that the NHL is the fourth of the big four major leagues, primarily because it's not as popular on TV as the others, but with the partnership with NBC and their recent merger with Comcast, I believe this gap will shrink.
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I don't have anything new to add to your list but the networking aspect is totally magnified. You have to network your butt off to get a gig in sports because the demand for open positions is so high. Many times jobs aren't posted on job boards because hiring managers already know candidates. You would also have to prepare to accept a job with significantly lower pay (unless you are a high-ranking executive).
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Most of my co-workers are die-hard hockey fans and their gigs are absolute dream jobs to them. I don't think anyone wants to work an 81-game schedule (not including the pre-season and playoffs) in the MLB, at least I don't. Sure, everyone wants to work in the NFL, both for the fact that it's the most popular league and there are only eight regular season games. But for the most part, my colleagues are completely happy working in hockey.
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Though HD has been a godsend for the NHL, the league hasn't been impacted as much as the NFL, NBA, or MLB as home entertainment has improved, since it's way better to see hockey live. Nevertheless, we focus a lot of our efforts on the game experience to keep fans happy and coming back. We do a lot of in-game fan engagement, such as text message voting, text-to-screen, intermission activities, giveaways, and contests. We play a lot of music and play a bunch of pump-up videos at certain points of the game to energize the crowd. We treat our games like big concert-like events, not just as hockey games.
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The game is frickin fast. Seriously, that's about it. Sure, there are instances where the puck is blocked by the dasherboards on the bottom of the TV screen or by players fighting for the puck, but for the most part of a hockey game, the puck is moving around very quickly on open ice. I think the FoxTrax glowing puck that Fox used for their NHL broadcasts from 1996-98 was the rigth idea to help fans see the puck on TV but apparently this wasn't well accepted by hockey purists. The advent of HD has been a godsend to televised hockey too.
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First of all, I like your username. Second, fighting definitely gets the fans pumped up which of course adds to the in-game experience. So I'd say that fighting is good for the game from the marketing perspective.
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