Quote ="bren2k"So your first proposition, in your view, has no causal link to the second statement?
If the sport is not selling seats to important games, surely the administrators bear some responsibility for that? Don't they have a duty to ensure that the product is attractive enough spectators that they want to attend live games? It's too simplistic to fall back on the stay away fans excuses - fans stay away for reasons, and it's not enough to suggest that the only reason is because they're too tight to pay full price for a game.'"
This is where there is a real lack of joined-up thinking from the RFL and the other key stakeholders - the clubs.
There is a fair criticism to be made that the sport is poorly marketed. What I think is unfair is how most of the blame for that is pinned on the RFL. If you actually look at attendances for the main events that the RFL is responsible for marketing (the Grand Final, Magic Weekend and the CC Final), the trendline points upwards for each of those events.
The vast majority of the events in the RL calendar are league and cup fixtures where the responsibility for marketing those fixtures falls onto the clubs - and that is the biggest failure of the sport in my view.
Whilst the RFL has its responsibilities to market the league as an entity, as a very basic 'Marketing 101 approach', you have to grow the audience at the main point of consumption - and this is invariably at local level. That local engagement then feeds into support for international events and the wider sport.
What seems to happen at the moment is that the RFL provides some branding and some collateral at the start of the season, but the clubs seem free to use that as much or as little as they want. There's very little consistency of activity, and very little joined-up thinking between the RFL/SLE and the clubs.
We have 12 Super League clubs, and very little growth at the majority of them, so we really need to look at why - and what they are doing to engage new supporters, to encourage ticket sales, to speak to and cater for the sorts of audiences that we want to attract, and the audiences that will attract the sort of sponsors that we want to attract, to engage young people through their community system to play the sport - all pretty basic points of marketing. The clubs know their local markets much better than the RFL. They know their proposition much better than the RFL and they know their business models much better than the RFL - the onus is on them to all deliver audience growth at a local level.
Forgive the anecdote, but I know of two clubs that have no documented social media marketing plan - despite this form of media offering enormous opportunities to overcome what many in the sport percieve as a media bias against us. I can tell you of another that is spending 60% of it's social media advertising budget advertising to people who are already buying the product being advertised. This is basic stuff that they should have been getting right five years ago - not still struggling with today.
It's not the RFL's fault that certain clubs can't sell tickets for a true, sustainable market value. It's not the RFL's fault that some clubs struggle to engage new supporters. It's not the RFL's fault that some clubs still play in grounds that really aren't condusive to attracting people new to the sport. It's not the RFL's fault that around half of the England squad in the Four Nations came from the acadamies of three clubs. It's not the RFL's fault that clubs can't get basic marketing principles right, or that they see marketing as a cost centre.
The RFL deserves it's criticisms but there's no doubt in my mind that it is being hamstrung by pretty much all of the member clubs in one shape or form. It's time we started sharing the blame accordingly, rather than always looking to Red Hall.
