An article featuring Tim Radley of VM-Unleashed! in Football Club Business Magazine
“Make a Football Experience to Remember!”
Christmas is an enormous opportunity for all retailers but in particular for those brands with a strong loyalty and emotional connection with their customers and where gift and impulse sales have the potential to go over the proverbial moon. Football Clubs are ideally placed to benefit from satisfying this seasonal appetite.
Ironically and in contrast to other retail the Christmas shopping frenzy may well result in visitors to Football Club stores spending longer and browsing harder than at regular times of the year. The usual pre-match or post-match whirlwind stop, depending on the day’s result can be replaced with a browsing experience in the more measured search for gifts for loved ones and of course self purchase.
This shouldn’t mean that clubs should be complacent as inspiration must be immediate. The key to sales success is to press all the obvious emotional buttons which are all too often missed. simply combining the best selling categories and products with the most popular players’ endorsements, the favourite colours, the classic games and the all-time halls of fame can lead down the glory road to becoming winners of the commercial championship in Christmas retail sales.
Football Clubs, in common with all sports brands, have a myriad of messages to use to sell everyday products to their adoring fans, with their endless appetite for memorabilia and collectables. How many this season will perform healthily in the midst of the winter season, whilst others remain languishing in the depths of a predictable product assortment counting the costs of Christmas past and the wasted opportunities of the current campaign.
Are you a sports club failing to maximise your retail potential?
Do you struggle to combine emotional engagement with hard product performance?
Tim Radley has worked with sports brands to improve their retail offer, emotional calendar and shopping experience.
For more information please get in touch…