Fiend at Court Unplugged
I am delivering on the promise I made yesterday to spend the rest of the weekend examining what a comprehensive consumer analysis for tennis entails. The image that accompanies this post is my literal first draft of that effort. First, let’s revisit the statement that sent me down this path.
We studied heavily the participation and retention numbers for national adult tournaments. Also, looked at various research papers on consumer spending habits, entertainment preferences, and free time and we found that it was important to provide players with various products that appeal to consumers based on their preferences.
USTA National Response to Fiend at Court Informational Request
Yesterday I commented that I was underwhelmed by that statement. The reason for this is because the question I asked was specific to studies or data collection that led to the conclusion that tournaments needed to be restructured. What I was hoping for was a tennis specific response. The first part of the statement is tennis specific, but not particularly relevant to tournaments occurring at the sectional level.
I do not believe that it is valid to study national adult tournaments to draw conclusions about local tournaments. For one thing, with the exception of the very recent innovation of NTRP nationals, adult national tournaments are age-group open events. It is simply not valid to draw tennis consumer marketing conclusions one from the other. They are apples and oranges.
The second part of the response is where my disappointment kicked into high gear. I was hoping for some tennis specific analysis rather than just considering general research papers on consumer spending habits. Anyone who has ever taken an entry level course in marketing, or read an article on marketing, or for that matter has more than a couple of synaptic connections will agree with the sentiment that it is important to have “products that appeal to consumers based on their preferences.” But, yes, thank you for that explanation.
When I picked up my pen and started thinking about marketing tennis tournaments to consumers, it was immediately obvious that the market had to be segmented to tailor marketing toward diverse constituencies. The first and most significant division is to separate the potential consumer market into people who are completely outside of tennis and people that have some degree of involvement with tennis.
This brings us back around to the first pillar of the USTA Strategic Plan.
Attract, Engage and Retain a New Generation of Diverse Tennis Participants
USTA Strategic Plan, Strategic Choice #1, June 8, 2020
People who are currently outside of tennis are clearly the target of this first objective. The USTA should be mounting marketing efforts and other initiatives to draw that broadly defined set of potential consumers across the divide to the point that they have some involvement with tennis.
That being said, I do not think that changing the structure of tournaments is an effective way to market tennis to people who are currently outside of the sport. This is fine because it would also be wildly inappropriate to market tournaments directly to people who have never played tennis before. There is a pretty significant learning curve associated with playing tennis in a competitive environment.
There should absolutely be a plan to market tennis to people that are currently completely outside of tennis. A campaign to market tennis tournaments to people that are already engaged in tennis should also separately exist. There are unique attributes of each of those consumer segments that lead me to assert that those should be independent marketing initiatives.
This is why it is disheartening to receive information that implies that non-tennis consumer analysis from marketing text books and research papers is the driving data behind the current decisions being made about tennis tournament marketing. I genuinely hope that the USTA is secretly sitting on a treasure trove of proprietary tennis consumer research that has been deemed to be too valuable to share.
Tomorrow we will cross the divide to talk about people who are already involved with tennis.
- Fiend at Court Request, July 21, 2020, (Official response to emailed questions.)
- 2021 Adult Tournament Changes, USTA National Webinar, undated.
- USTA Adult Tournament Changes for 2021, USTA National Website, viewed 7/25/2020
- USTA Announces Sweeping Plan to Reorganize and Prioritize Its Structure, Events, and Activities to Grow the Game and Service the Broader Tennis Industry, USTA Official Press Release, hosted on Open Court website, viewed 8/2/2020.
