University Sports Marketing: Boosting Attendance and Revenue
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 Business Situation: Problems and Solutions: Low attendance drives revenue shortfall at athletic events
- Objective of the Plan: Target freshmen to increase attendance and revenue
- Targeting the Freshman Market: Geographic concentration makes freshmen cost-effective to reach
- Incentives and Promotional Strategies: Free admission, prizes, and booster club perks proposed
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What makes this paper effective
- The paper follows a clear problem-solution structure, moving logically from diagnosing the revenue shortfall to proposing targeted interventions.
- It grounds its audience-selection rationale in concrete behavioral logic — freshmen have no prior price expectations and represent up to four years of potential attendance.
- Specific, actionable tactics (free admission, prize giveaways, halftime competitions) are tied directly to the identified audience segment rather than offered as generic suggestions.
Key academic technique demonstrated
The paper demonstrates market segmentation as an applied marketing strategy. Rather than addressing the full university population broadly, it narrows the target to a single, geographically concentrated cohort (freshman on North Campus) and explains why that segment maximizes return on marketing investment — a textbook example of concentrated targeting in a nonprofit/athletic context.
Structure breakdown
The paper is organized into four functional sections: a situation analysis identifying the core problem; a statement of measurable objectives; a segmentation and strategy rationale; and a concrete list of promotional tactics. This mirrors a standard abbreviated marketing plan format, making it a useful model for introductory sports marketing or business courses.
The Business Situation: Problems and Solutions
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.
Objective of the Plan
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.
Targeting the Freshman Market
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.
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