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PLAYER ADVERTISING One way to get more fans to come to your stadium is to advertise your players to your fans in order to tickle their baseball bone. The benefit of advertising is that it slowly, but steadily increases the support and loyalty of your fans. This in turn has a positive effect on attendance. Of course, when it comes to increasing attendance, there is no substitute for victory. Winning is the best way to increase attendance, but advertising will give your franchise a little extra push. When it comes to advertising players, you cannot directly choose whom you will advertise. Instead, you will choose a marketing strategy based on marketing your team's All-Stars, sluggers, rotation, fielders or rookies. From there, the game will assign a player who fits that description. You should start by setting the budget for advertising. This is a yearly budget, so I like to set the total budget to its maximum level, which comes to a grand total of $13,200,000 per year. I think that it is worth it. Keep in mind as well that once you begin the season, you can always change this amount, as well as the marketing strategy. If you have committed to a maximized advertising budget, then you should probably stick with it, but you should never stick with the same marketing strategy. This can be changed independently of the budget, so you should be mixing this up as the season moves along with different strategies and different players. TEAM ADVERTISING Team advertising is identical to that of player advertising except for one aspect that keeps team advertising more dynamic. With team advertising, you can adjust the message of your advertisements to be more in sync with your team's situation. For example, you can begin the season with the "Start of the Season" message, and then change it a week or so into the season. If you have a winning streak going, then you can switch your advertising message to "Keep the Streak." Some types of advertising have more of an impact than others which means that TV advertising is both the most expensive and the most effective. Keep this open for adjustment based on your team's situation. Newspaper and magazine advertising are good for generic messages, but use TV and radio to adjust your message to your situation. Finally, let me make an important note here about both player and team advertising. Does it make any sense to use advertising to draw fans to your stadium if you are selling out every game? Of course not, but I certainly would not recommend cutting your adverting budgets to zero. Advertising is something that keeps your fans interested and coming to the ball park. However, once you are selling out your stadium on a consistent basis, there should not be much problem by cutting your advertising budget by about one-fourth. You still need some advertising, just not as much. Depending on your team, play around with this and find out what works. PROMOTIONS The first thing that I want to say about promotions is this: don't go nuts with numerous, big, expensive promotions as a means of raising attendance. That's simply not the way to do it. It is more useful to think of promotions as an extension of team advertising. What I mean by that is that promotions can be used most cost effectively as a means of slowly building fan support over a long period as opposed to increasing support in small, but temporary bursts. With team advertising, you can adjust you message to send word to the public about your promotions with the "Upcoming Events" choice. This provides a bit of synergy to the effectiveness of your promotions. Although player morale and support is something that you should not worry about too much, fan support is crucial. One way of keeping fans happy is to constantly have them looking forward to your next promotion. There is also one more reason why doing a lot of big, expensive promotions is a bad idea. When it comes to total fan support, there are so many variables that determine fan support that the weight that promotions have in determining this support does not justify large costs. Some of these variables are things like wins, concession prices, ticket prices, your position in the standings, the time gap between promotions, and advertising spending among other things. With all of these taken into account, promotions alone cannot justify a ton of spending on promotions. Instead, you want to slowly, but steadily, raise fan support over the long run with a bunch of small, cheap promotions. The way to do this is to drop a small promotion in the middle of every home stand, and I must stress that it should be done IN THE MIDDLE OF THE HOME STAND. If you do it on the first day of the home stand, then you will mess up your tests for things like optimal ticket and concession prices when doing the STL method. The two cheapest promotions that you can do are the "Program Night" at $2 per unit and "Ball Night" at $3 per unit. I like to do a promotion of about 3,000 units for each home stand. The cost is small and your fans will always be looking forward to the next promotion. I have to make one very important note about free ticket promotions. The game lists the cost of this promotion as zero. Do not be fooled! The cost of this promotion is very real and, as ticket prices begin to rise, this could end up being one of the most expensive promotions that you can do. Although the game says that the cost is zero, you are in fact paying a cost for this promotion since you are forfeiting the revenue that you otherwise might have gained. Let me illustrate with a simple example. Suppose that you have a lemonade stand. Each cup that you sell costs you $0.25 worth of lemons, sugar, and ice, not to mention the paper cup. You are also charging $1.00 per cup of lemonade. Therefore, your expected profit per cup is $0.75. Your best friend stops by and you offer him/her a free cup. Did your give away cost you nothing? No, since you obviously had to pay for the ingredients that went into making that cup of lemonade. Then you might say "So the cost of my give away was $0.25." Wrong again. The true cost of giving away that cup was in fact $0.75. Since each cup earns you a profit of $0.75, you just forfeited $0.75 worth of profits! That is what you truly lost by giving away a cup of lemonade. The same principal applies to a free ticket give away. The cost of giving away tickets is the money that you COULD have earned by selling them. Now the question is how are the free tickets given away? Are they given away randomly or is there some structure? Well, it's a combination of both. The tickets that are given away are distributed among all of your seating sections. The more tickets that you decide to give away, the more expensive this promotion will be. |
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06-12-2012, 11:37 PM
