Segmentation of football fans

The Client
A leading Ukrainian football club.

The Challenge
As the clubs popularity was mainly “local” and limited to specific fixtures it did not possess a clear image in terms of ideology and philosophy. The task was to create a clear brand for football team. The created brand should have an impact on attendance at stadiums and watching of matches on TV because of the “teams” participation in the game.

So, the main research objective was searching for insights, which could be used in the creation of the football team’s identity. Also, it was necessary to obtain information that would help to construct a structure of values and architecture of the renewed brand.

This task was complicated by a lack of information about awareness and attitudes towards the club and of football “customers” in general.

The Solution
In order to understand the mechanism of loyalty formation towards certain football clubs, research was conducted in three stages.

At the first two stages qualitative research methodologies (Focus Groups) were used.

At the first stage, the phenomenon of football clubs popularity was studied in order to build an initial model of loyalty formation towards football clubs and which fixtures had a meaning not only as sport but also to the cities where the fans and clubs were based.

At the second stage we studied brand image in different cities of Ukraine and the current perception of our clients club. Also, we evaluated the level of sincerity of support for the fans favorite team. It revealed the potential “growth areas” of loyalty towards the team, possible directions of club-society life development and development of life related to the club society.

The third stage was quantitative research which aimed to segment an audience by the nature of support and its level (for example ardent, faithful, moderate, and devoted fans) and by sensitivity to various promotional activities.

The Business Result
The Client received:

• Profile and size of potential audience
• Profile of the most active and loyal group of fans and its size
• Channels and mechanisms of influence on potential audience for the purpose of conversion of its representatives into regular match visitors
• The most trustworthy channels of communication, the list of people able to influence behavior of actual and potential audience of a sporting club