Examining Fan Journey to Inform Marketing Strategy
The Call
A recently formed Professional Golf League set out to modernize the sport by infusing new levels of excitement while building their league’s fandom. With a healthy number of tournaments in the current season, the league set out to better understand the fan journey to attendance in order to better inform marketing and fan engagement strategy for the next year. They partnered with Catapult to support overarching strategy development and identify market-specific considerations for a first-time tournament in a new city.
Our Response
Catapult designed a qualitative program that included on-course intercepts across the 3-day tournament in the new city. Our research team conducted dozens of interviews with fans to hear their stories and understand the pathways and decision points that led to tournament attendance. Because it was important to get a mix of fan types, our team used observational techniques to identify locals vs. tourists as well as a variety of hospitality/experience levels.
After the tournament concluded, Catapult then conducted webcam interviews using the client’s CSAT survey as a recruiting channel. These post-tourney touchpoints allowed us to go deeper into the fan journey and provide a holistic, well-rounded look at fan experiences and drivers of decision making.
The Celebration
We identified critical insights focused around themes of discoverability, drivers within the decision journey, and fan experience, producing six defining elements of the league’s tournament experience that our client should lean into. Our report outlined key moments and mindsets within fan journeys, specific benefits fans find alluring enough to buy tournament tickets, how the league currently conveys each benefit, and identified whitespace where the client could do more to showcase and enhance key attractants. The insights-to-action oriented client wasted no time socializing the findings with the marketing team, and mere months later their fan outreach efforts helped break attendance records at subsequent tournaments around the world.