Rewarding your best customers while boosting your sales

Nowadays sports fans have a multitude of options available to them for following their favourite team. Online game-trackers providing real time play-by-play, HD television and internet radio feeds. Sports franchises themselves are probably most worried about the emergence of HDTV because the product is so good that it is almost like being in reasonable seats at the game. That means they need to find a way to make the game experience that much better to encourage fans to continue to buy tickets for the real deal.

Like a franchise rewards their top players with long-term contracts, they also need to look at ways to reward their best customers, season ticket holders.

A football/soccer team in Italy has come up with a brilliant way to thank their best fans while at the same time probably create a large rush for merchandise. Recently Parma Football Club revealed their kits (or uniforms as us North Americans call them) for the upcoming 2012/13 season.




 

See those faint grey lines on the white part of the jersey? Those are the names of every single season ticket holder. Genius. What better way to thank your fans than having your players wear their name in games. I guarantee they will sell quite a few jerseys, especially to the season ticket holders. 

Marble: The official cheese of Kliff's Notes

Are you going to go out and buy a block of marble cheese now that you know it is the "Official Cheese" of the world-famous Kliff's Notes blog???

No? Well...shit. Good thing the cheese people aren't paying me then I guess.

This blog post is based on me walking into my local Subway and noticing on the door that Subway is now the "Official Sandwich of the BC Lions". I almost turned around and left, more because I dislike the CFL and the BC Lions than the sandwich shop itself. But do sponsorship dollars, like Subway no doubt had to spend to get this lofty title, spent on these type of sponsorships really work? Will I ultimately buy Gillette deodorant because it is the "Deodorant of the NHL"? Nope, not a chance.

Now there are obviously other parts to these sponsorship deals - exclusive mention on team/league websites, programming, etc. - but the whole "Official so and so" seems like such a joke way to explain things. Sponsorship that is more directly related to the sport/league/event makes sense to me, ie. "Blackberry, the official way to act like your working when really your sitting on your ass eating cheetos" or "Depends, the official diaper of long bowling" works fine for me. But the official sandwich of a football team? Nope, I just don't care.