NFL

Hanging With The Fans: Strategic Consultation

Defining how fan festivals drive appeal

Growing The Global Fanbase

With a priority business objective of growing the league’s global fanbase, the NFL had identified a touring festival experience as an important component in meeting their ambitions. The template for activity would broadly look to mirror the success of previous NFL festivals – including those at the International Series games in Mexico – providing interactive experiences through which new fans could begin their journey, and existing fans would gather to further fuel their love of gridiron.

Crowd DNA’s role: to evaluate exactly how the fan fest concept would best act as a driver of long term sustainable support for NFL; as well as assist in identifying best practice strategies to roll out in key markets around the world.

Project Design

Based on workshopping the objectives with NFL’s stakeholder team, we channeled the project’s core purpose thus:

+ To define overall levels of interest in the festival experience (by market and fan type)

+ To identify which festival features and activities will best motivate attendance and subsequently encourage enduring fandom

+ To unlock (and size) drivers and barriers to success, extending from the communication of the event through to the design of the day itself

+ We blended quantitative and qualitative methods to get to the required mix of data and audience empathy that would underpin our strategic consultation

Designing Experiences For Different Markets

With an eye for recognising important cultural nuances, the work produced a best practice roadmap for developing the fan fest experience across different markets, with the Crowd DNA team working closely with the NFL to edit down to the most vital insights and directives to share with different global teams.

All of which has meant NFL’s fan fest initiatives are now equipped to cut through in the fiercely competitive global sports market, reaching out to prospective fans, and deepening relationships with existing ones, authentically and accessibly.

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