The Sports Business Journal came out with an article yesterday on NHL TV ratings for 21 U.S. markets (Nashville and Carolina’s information was unavailable). The Blue Jackets have the highest ratings increase in the league up 110%, blowing away the New Jersey Devils who are up the second most at 58%.
The Blue Jackets have been the most surprising team in the league. Written off before the season even started but 16 wins in a row later, people have started to take notice. It’s not just showing up in TV rating’s either. Fans are coming out and supporting the team at Nationwide Arena. Average attendance, courtesy of
HockeyDB is up to 15,363, a 4.75% increase over last season.
This has significant benefits both on the ice and off the ice. The better the team does on the ice from a performance standpoint, the better the team will do off the ice from a business standpoint, in terms of sales, which means more money can be put into the on-ice product. The cycle doesn’t always manifest itself in a single season however. The Blue Jackets as an example made the playoffs in 2013-14. That season much like this one had an attendance boost, plus the added revenue from three home playoff games. The on-ice results didn’t follow right away as the team missed the playoffs in each of the following two seasons, but there’s no doubt the extra revenue brought in from that season helped sign players like Brandon Saad and Sergei Bobrovsky to the large extensions they got.
We are already starting to see the immediate effects of what a winning team can do to TV ratings and attendance, but there are long-term effects as well and this is where the marketing department plays a huge role. After a playoff season teams usually maintain or even improve on their attendance increase. That is because teams promote playoff tickets with future ticket packages. The common one is always buy season tickets for next year to ensure you get playoff tickets this year. The Jackets are already doing this with their “Guarantee Your Seats!” promotion.
All these promotions are done with the idea of moving people up the “Frequency Escalator.” The frequency escalator is a sport marketing term built around the idea of growing your fan base from fans that are unaware of your team up to those who are season ticket holders, and all the stages in-between.
With TV ratings up 110% the Jackets have brought a ton of people in the non-consumer range up to the media consumer and indirect consumer range. The key now is using their playoff ticket promotion to get those media users to become light users, light users to medium users and medium users to heavy users.
Once you get media users to become light users, you have to keep them. You don’t want them to fall back to being non-consumers if the team stops winning. Winning is the best way to keep fans engaged but winning is not guaranteed. You need to have a great game entertainment crew to make sure fans have a great time at the arena even if the team loses. The Jackets have done a great job at this.
Columbus will always be a football city but the Blue Jackets have grabbed the public’s attention and have people watching hockey. The team is doing everything they can to keep these new fans and hopefully they stay around past this season. That would do wonders for the team financially so they can continue to spend the money necessary to keep players here and contend for the playoffs and ideally the Stanley Cup year after year.
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