This paper presents a sports marketing plan designed to address low attendance and insufficient revenue at a university's sporting events. The plan identifies incoming freshman students as an ideal target audience due to their concentration on campus, lack of price-comparison habits, and high potential for school spirit. Proposed strategies include free admission incentives, booster club–funded transportation, discounted merchandise, and experiential promotions such as halftime contests and athlete appearances at campus dining facilities. The plan emphasizes the social and communal dimensions of Ivy League athletics as key drivers of attendance.
The core problem facing the university's sports marketing program is low attendance at sporting events — even at popular, revenue-generating events such as basketball and football. This shortfall is producing a correspondingly low level of revenue for the organization. To address this, the program must build a greater revenue base by increasing attendance, raising public awareness of the appeal of its sporting events, and expanding the populations within its target audience.
The objective of the plan is to increase attendance and revenue at popular spectator events by targeting a new and potentially lucrative audience: incoming university freshmen. This population is ideal because it is young, new to the institution, and full of potential school spirit. Freshmen also represent up to four years of future attendance, and — crucially — they have no prior frame of reference for ticket prices or past game experiences. Sporting venues offer ideal social gathering spaces for freshmen to build the kind of social networks they will hopefully maintain long after graduation.
Precise audience segmentation is central to the success of this plan. The geographic concentration of freshmen on the university's North Campus makes them an exceptionally cost-efficient target: they can be reached through a range of advertising channels — from posters to staged publicity events — at relatively low cost. The entertainment value and social atmosphere of Ivy League sports should be emphasized in all messaging, since post-game gatherings and celebrations (whether for victory or defeat) naturally spill over into residential areas of campus. Historically, the communal experience rather than elite athletic performance has been the primary driver of attendance at Ivy League games, and this message should be front and center in outreach to new students.
"Free admission, prizes, and booster club perks proposed"
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