Okay, let’s be up-front about one thing — the NFL has had a long history of success dating back more than 75 years. So to say that the NFL has not succeeded in marketing might be a bit of a stretch. But that’s not what we’re here to talk about today. We’re here to talk about the FUTURE of the NFL, not its past.

Rule #1 in marketing is to get inside the mind of your customer. Before you think about any strategy, before you think about any tactic and before you think about executing either one of them, you need to get inside the mind of your customer and figure out what it is that they’re actually buying.

Most followers of the NFL are looking for one thing — excitement. They’re looking to live vicariously through the NFL players and to re-live their former glory (or imagined glory) on the field of battle. It’s really no more complex than that — show us larger-than-life athletes who do battle every Sunday in front of millions of fans and celebrate all the excitement that comes with that.

So why, then, does the NFL continue to suck the life out of their games? Why do they insist on taking any fun, originality or spirit out of professional football?

Every Spring, the owners gather together and come up with additional rules designed to make professional football as lame as possible. Do you want to spike the ball? Penalty. Do you want to celebrate after scoring a touchdown? Penalty. Do you want to dance with your teammates after a big sack? Penalty.

It’s mind-boggling that the owners can completely suck the life out of the game and come back every Spring and suck even more life out of the game. Do you want to see some energy and life in the fans? Then go to a college football game and check out the noise, the excitement and the energy. Do you want to see fans who are watching a game because of force of habit? Then check out an NFL game.

NASCAR could teach a few things to the NFL. The explosion in viewership of NASCAR that happened a few years ago was because they understood a fundamental rule of marketing — if you want to get people to buy your product, you need to get inside their minds and figure out what it is that they’re actually buying.

So, what is it that the NASCAR customer was buying? Was it watching a small car drive around a track 500 times? Absolutely not. What the NASCAR customer was buying was excitement, energy and escapism. So, with that in mind, NASCAR retooled how you EXPERIENCE a race. They put cameras in the car that enabled viewers to feel like they were the drivers. They made race-day events at the track as big a deal as the actual race. And they allowed the personalities of the drivers (both good and bad) to come through larger-than-life on the small screen.

The NFL, on the other hand, has done the exact opposite. They’ve done everything they absolutely can to minimize the personalities of the players and the teams. It’s as if the players were as old as the owners and decided that it would be unseemly to celebrate, make some noise or express themselves.

For the next 5 years, the NFL will be safe because they have a built-in audience. But as consumers look for more and more exciting things to do, they’ll start turning away to NASCAR, College Football, Extreme Sports and other adrenaline-inducing sports.

If you’re a business-owner, the very first thing you should do is to figure out what it is your customer is actually buying. Mercedes-Benz doesn’t sell cars, they sell status. Apple doesn’t sell iPods, they sell cool. Banks don’t sell checking accounts, they sell safety and convenience. (Okay, given the economy, that was a bad example, but you get the idea.)

The NFL should recognize that their customer doesn’t want to buy football, they want to buy energy, excitement and escapism. But if they keep on sucking the life out of the game, they’ll find their audiences dwindling more and more every year. And that, my friends, is something we can all learn from.

Thursday, October 2nd, 2008, 7:42 am   |   General Marketing  |  RSS feed |  Respond  |  Trackback