Baseball Marketers: 3 Strategies for Combatting the Attendance Deficit

As a marketer in professional baseball, you would agree that one of the most important parts of a team’s success is their fan base.  You would also agree that the supposedly shrinking fanbase is one of the most persistent trends in baseball coverage today.  As both an avid sports fan and an undergraduate marketing and communications student at Northwestern University, I’ve found two articles that analyze the attendance problem and offer suggestions to help keep fans engaged, in and out of the ballpark.

Evan Drellich’s ‘How interested are you right now?’ Attendance, changing fandom and the health of Major League Baseball for The Athletic discusses mainly the trends that contribute to falling attendance.  Through interviews with commissioner Rob Manfred and social psychologist Rich Luker, Drellich susses out that the fall in attendance is not really an interest problem, but a free-time and location problem.  According to Luker’s Sports Poll, in 2019, 60% of MLB fans live out-of-market of their team.  Contrary to the popular narrative, interest in baseball is actually increasing, especially with technologies like MLB’s At-Bat App and online streaming service, MLB.tv, that offer those out-of-market fans access to their team’s content anytime and anywhere.  For that remaining 40% of fans who live within visiting distance of their favorite team, Drellich reports that technology still plays an important part.  Maybe you’ve heard outcry about the length of game?  Manfred says that may actually be an advantage – as long as teams take good advantage of the down time.  “Our game is the ideal second-screen experience,” Manfred said.

Credit: Brace Hemmelgarn

In their article Baseball Saw a Million More Empty Seats. Does It Matter? for the New York Times, Danielle Allentuck and Kevin Drapper take on another huge factor affecting those in-market fans: ticket prices.  From nose-bleeds to box seats, people simply have less time to invest in attending professional athletics, especially when those athletics occur over the steep 81 home games each MLB club hosts every summer.  Season ticket sales account for a huge block of every team’s ticket revenue, but Allentuck and Drapper say that the system needs to adapt alongside its patrons’ busy schedules.  They champion ballpark access packages that offer young fans with young-fan incomes an affordable way to take in as much of their home team as they want.  Though they may not pull in substantial income off the bat, they build up something Allentuck and Drapper argue is more important: team loyalty.  On the other end of the spectrum, they also take on the issue of corporate boxes.  Similarly to their entry-level counterparts, the traditional executive owners of corporate boxes fall too short on time to spare three hours approximately every other night for four months, and are deciding in increasing numbers to cut ties with those premium suites.  Still, luxury sports experiences haven’t lost their appeal for recruiting, entertaining, and schmoozing.  According to Allentuck and Drapper, clubs need to figure out how to meet fans where they’re at.

Based on both of these articles and my experience, I have come up with three best practices for adapting marketing efforts to a changing fandom:

1.     Integrate the Experience – for fans in and out of the ballpark, use digital platforms to enhance the experience of watching live baseball.

2.     Activate Your Fans – use accessible ticket bundles to meet young fans where they (and their incomes) are at and lock in team loyalty for years to come.

3.     Adapt Premium Packages – keep corporate deals rolling against the time-crunch by marketing luxury experiences in smaller doses.

So the next time you’re faced with the prospect of an empty ballpark, remember these recommendations to bridge the interest/attendance gap and lock in your fanbase for years to come.

About the Author

Shealyn Abbott is a fourth-year student at Northwestern University, preparing to graduate this spring with her Bachelor of Arts in communication studies and English literature and a certificate in IMC.  She’s spent the last four years marketing student theatre to the greater Evanston, IL, area and currently serves as the Vice President of Public Relations for Northwestern’s Panhellenic Association.  In her free time, Shealyn advocates for the Oxford comma and the designated hitter and counts down the days until Opening Day.

Follow her on Twitter and connect with her on LinkedIn!

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