Sports Marketing Today: My Impressions from the Sports Summit Mexico 2024

One of the first analogies I ever used to talk about the loyalty that companies aspire to was to achieve fans as passionate and loyal as those of sports teams. After all, who wouldn’t want their customers to be so convinced of their preference, and to hold them as close to their hearts as soccer team supporters do?

However, this simplification, which served to illustrate the point, does not fully represent the reality of sports companies today. These institutions, like companies in other goods and services sectors, also have occasional followers, new audiences to convince, defectors, customers who do not consume the minimum, and competitors who vie for the attention and interest of their fans in real time. In other words, they face the same challenges as all companies in acquiring, retaining, and growing their customer base.

This is the omnipresent premise in the presentations at the Sports Summit Mexico 2024, taking place on July 3 and 4, 2024, in Mexico City. Amid panels, debates, and presentations, the marketing heads of sports teams, owners, executives, players, and media representatives gather to exchange best practices, share challenges, and discuss campaigns and strategies to achieve their goals, which, as mentioned earlier, are not much different from those shared by other industries:

- How to collect and use data to inform strategy and personalize the experience?

- How to engage Generation Z (and those who come after) so that they become interested in their brands as early as possible?

- How to segment audiences, use social media more efficiently, and create content that delivers results?

- How to adapt the product to make it more relevant to current tastes and preferences?

- How to compete in an environment of piracy, facilitated by digital media, and legal frameworks that are rapidly becoming outdated?

During the first day of the Summit, I listened with great interest to the opinions of prominent figures such as the President of Spain’s La Liga, Javier Tebas; the owner of Atlético de Madrid, Miguel Ángel Gil; the directors in Mexico of Major League Baseball (MLB) and the National Football League (NFL); and representatives of local and foreign teams in soccer, basketball, and other sports.

Below, I share some ideas that resonated with me and that I noted for their relevance and because they summarize the spirit of the Summit and its applicability within and beyond its specific industry:

1. Fans, even the most loyal ones, cannot be taken for granted.

2. Attracting audiences is not easy, but we have many tools to achieve it. What is difficult is retaining them. That is the real challenge.

3. Audience segmentation can be an endless task. We must do it according to criteria that are useful and relevant, but above all, actionable.

4. The most common effort today to engage fans is content, content, content.

5. The ultimate goal is to monetize, generate, or increase revenue.

6. The Fan Journey (Customer Journey) in sports teams also involves considering the rituals fans have when enjoying the experience.

7. Different sports are considering modifying the rules of their disciplines (such as baseball, which is rethinking the length of games to maintain the interest of younger audiences), or examining how to improve the viewing experience (including details like the number of cameras/perspectives used to broadcast games and make them more dynamic). This translates into reformulating, testing, and adjusting the product to adapt to the times we live in.

8. Athletes are also in the game of building their own personal brands. They are now content creators as well.

9. More than sports companies, they see themselves as entertainment companies; this is the field in which they compete.

10. Media like YouTube represent a new reality in how sports are consumed and have generated new actors who are now part of the industry as channels for dissemination, news, and the like (competing with traditional media).

At the end of the first day of the event, I am left with the feeling that digitization, young audiences (and their new ways of consuming entertainment), as well as the challenges of obtaining and using data to segment and personalize experiences, affect all industries in a very similar way, and not even the sports industry, which we always associate with die-hard fans, is exempt. These fans are increasingly rare, and their retention is key to the growth and sustainability of companies that wish to remain relevant.