Re: Wisconsin Hockey XXXIV: A Season without Chuck
The product on the ice needs to be fixed first is what i'm saying. You could lose a potential new fan for life if they come and see the team get pounded in a lifeless building. We all became fans in the glory days of badger hockey, not four win seasons. Marketing a bad product will get you one buy, but not repeat buyers.
I'm going to have to disagree with most of that. First of all, those two things don't have to happen one at a time. Second, the damage done by keeping Wisconsin hockey out of sight and mind is much greater than the diminished returns from a newbie seeing something less than elite.
Also, I became a fan in 2011, and I have plenty of friends who have been going to every game starting at or after that time. A large chunk of our time watching UW hockey has been during this turmoil.
Marketing a sports team is a much different, and
much more abstract, situation than marketing some kind of food. It's the reason why people usually find more enjoyment rooting for one team through the ups and downs, rather than just watching whichever team is ranked number 1 each week. The "product" is the experience of being a fan. That's everything from the actual plays being made on the ice to discussions had with fellow fans during the week. I once saw someone try to argue that sports fandom is an absurd case of brand loyalty, as if rooting for a bad team is the same thing as continuing to buy faulty parts for your car. The reason why almost every sports fan will disagree with that is the same reason that this isn't approached in the same way.
Casual fans (the ones for whom this stuff makes the difference*) aren't going to come to a game and decide they had a bad time because of all the stuff has been discussed on this board for the past few years. They're going to see a hockey game. Would the games this season be ideal? No, but it's what we have to work with. If someone was at Saturday's game, they would've seen some good D-I hockey, and would've been slightly disappointed that the Badgers couldn't come back to win. There is virtually no chance that that will diminish their willingness to buy a ticket to a game a couple of years from now. Brand awareness and recognition are important things in all of marketing, and they're extra important when it comes to cultivating a sports team's fan base...because they have to
follow the team. In fact, those people will be more likely to buy tickets in the future if they go to a game in this weird year than if UW hockey remains a fringe thing in their peripheral vision when they log on to UWBadgers.com. People who aren't watching the team right now aren't watching because it's not a "thing" in their mind - they're not interested. They're not waiting around saying, "hmmm, maybe I'll try this Badger Hockey thing, but only when the time is right."
*Also the ones who make the difference between a big-time college sport and being some kind of "extra."
As far as seeing the team get pounded in a lifeless building is concerned -
I can't speak for how lively the building is, because I know it sucks compared to what it should be, but from the middle of the student section, the difference is much less striking. However, is it going to be more or less lively if more people give it a shot? More lively.
Thankfully, the team hasn't been really pounded at home this year. Even on Saturday, the Badgers showed some life to make it 4-2 for quite a while. What was happening on the ice was a far cry from that disaster versus Michigan last year (the one where Michigan got a 3 goal lead about 6 minutes in). There were enough exciting plays in there that it wasn't going to make people think "wow, college hockey is boring."
I know I've mentioned it before, but I feel like I cannot stress enough that they need to treat the program like they're completely building it. That's not to say they should ignore the team's history, of course - that's a big selling point. I mean it in terms of getting people who are barely aware of what college hockey is and what Wisconsin Badgers hockey to be aware.
I wish I had a better grasp of how exactly men's hockey was viewed on campus during those blocks of time, but I know that the casual sports fans on campus only a few years ahead of me have a radically different view of Wisconsin Badgers men's hockey than do the students on campus now. People were, for the most part, 100% unaware that the team was among the best in the country in 2013-14. They had no idea that they were supposed to be one of the best coming in, and they had no idea that maybe, just maybe, that home series vs. Minnesota should've been appointment TV if they couldn't get tickets. I wonder how many students watched the NCAA tournament game vs UND. I would guess the number could be described as "low." I know of plenty of NHL fans who, while into the sport, are at the very best loosely aware of what's going on with the Badgers. They certainly aren't actively following the team and participating as fans. (By "participating," I'm including the broadest methods of following a sports team - regularly reading about what happens, tuning in to games sometimes, and feeling more than the minimum emotional response to things that happen in games.)
The more time spent with that being the case, the deeper into the hole of minimal relevance the program will fall.
I hope that made sense. I didn't re-read it because I didn't sleep very much and it's late, but if there's one thing I can rattle off paragraphs about, it's Wisconsin Badgers hockey brand equity.
