And on the other note; how many non fans would see an advert for the club and think 'oh I really must go a match?'.

It would be interesting to find out how many people who have not been a match before take advantage of an offer or is it just existing fans like me who jump on them? The Groupon deal for London springs to mind.

I think it has to be marketed as a family day out. I'm not sure on numbers but I am told that the groupon deal worked well and shifted a lot of tickets, but I'm not sure how many of those were to existing supporters. Shame that it wasn't really a great game for anyone new who did go. But then does that matter? There are some horrendously boring and one sided games in the Premier League, yet people still travel from all over to watch.

On a slightly different note, Salford are offering free tickets to every school kid and a parent/guardian in Salford for Friday's game. Good idea?

you know what, at first i thought it was a good idea, however just giving people tickets, still won't make them turn up, if they dont want to, or aren't interested.

Anything to consider, who are they playing? (i genuinely dont know) i say this cos if you cast your mind back to pre the 95 world cup, the wire released a load of free tickets when we were playing halifax, and got rolled over quite convincingly, therefore negating the freebies and whatever positive traction that could've come from getting potential customers in the ground.

Run forward a couple of weeks, we did it again, free tickets against workington, think this one was on sky, (the infamous whistle in the away end game that the ref stopped the game for) again, we got beat by what was considered to be a pretty weak worky side at the time, a dean marwood drop goal IIRC.

They can give free tickets away, but if they get trounced, it'll be a pretty worthless excercise.

That said, fair play to them for doing it, doing SOMETHING.

just back on topic as well, the friend for a fiver vouchers we get in our season tickets, i've always used them for mates who are non ST holders, but go on a regular basis to get in cheap, i've never managed to convince a n00b to come along.

Bradford, so potentially a decent contest. When I was in school quite often we would get offered vouchers to exchange for free child entry (not sure whether parent got in free). They would either get snubbed, go in the pocket and forgotten about or people like myself from a non RL background would take it home and get told you're not watching that.

When I was about 9 we went on a trip to Wilderspool and came back with all sorts of freebies, which had me wanting to go back. But you've also got to convince the roundball watching parent too. Though that may just be my personal experience.

As you say, fair play to them for trying. If a few enjoy it and go back then it has worked I guess!

As stated previously SM is a promoter and between them, we propbably have one of the (if not THE) best commercially run clubs in SL. I'm sure there are all kinds of calculators being run "in the background" as to what promotions would cost and the extra profits they would generate, and Im sure that free/discount tickets are amongst them. We all know that you can chase crowds by selling cheap but does it make commercial sense? I dont know....lets ask Bradford.

As well as "global" commercial issues, different clubs will face different challenges and also, based on the local demigraphic different solutions will work for them. For example....Wigans crowd next year may increase as ex-top-flight-football fans in Wigan go to the rugby to watch top-flight sport. Warrington doesnt have a top-flight team and many "sports" fans are already committed to sport outside of the town by supporting the Manchester or Liverpool clubs.

Do I have a solution? No. Do I know of a group of people who know better than I? Yes. And on that score i will leave it to the board to decide the best way forward.

I honestly don't think Warrington is a "rugby town" in the true sense of the term, and I've always said the same. It might have become slightly moreso since the move to the HJ and the recent Wembley successes, but as a kid I always new far more kids (and their parents) who were into football than rugby.

Where I lived (Old Hall) I didn't know a single person who supported Warrington, but everyone supported a football team (Liverpool, Everton or Man United - there was no Man City at the time, and certainly no Chelsea, Arsenal or anyone else). At school there was a few Wires, but they all supported a football team as well (again one of the same three), and there were others who liked football but not rugby. I didn't know anyone who was the other way round (and in real life, outside of this internet world, I still don't).

In St. Helens and Wigan I always got the feeling it was very much the other way round, and rugby came first. Not in Warrington though, and that's despite there being no professional football club in the town itself at any time. You can magnify that situation by a thousand in Salford where Man United lie on the boundary of the city itself and firmly within the local conurbation.

I personally only got into the game at the age of 14 when it became something to do with my mates from school. We couldn't go to the football together because we supported different teams, and those of us who supported the same weren't all allowed to just go and catch a train to Liverpool, but we were all allowed to go to Wilderspool. This will be a bigger attraction for kids now because football is more out of reach to them from a match going perspective than it has ever been for a variety of reasons but primarily financial.

If you can target the new town areas like Chapelford and get kids interested in their local team that they can go and watch with their mates rather than relying on disinterested parents (neither of mine have been in either ground in the 32 years they have lived in Warrington) then that's where the future of our support lies and will grow.

I had pretty much this exact conversation with a Salford fan (who used to live in Old Hall) after the game on Sunday. I live in Whittle Hall and growing up nobody in the area that I knew followed the sport, very few people at school had an interest and those who did tended to support Saints. I think during all my time in school we must have played RL no more than five times.

I think the problem is that Sankey, Westbrook, Callands etc are very much 'new town' areas. A lot of families like mine come from Liverpool, and still identify themselves with the city more. I only got into the sport when I was 16 when a mate from college asked me to go and I thought why not. I have been to most games since! No reason why other people won't be the same, especially as things are a lot better at the club than when I started watching.

Like you say, Warrington has never really felt like a rugby town in the way that neighbouring St Helens, Wigan and even Leigh do. I think that is starting to change and the clubs image has improved a lot lately, someone on here or the VT quoted Peter Deakin recently saying that making the back pages isn't enough, you have to be getting towards the front of the paper too and establish the club at the heart of the community. I would have a stall in that new Sainsburys on Chapelford with Wolfie and the cup handing out offers etc and freebies, get folk interested.

Some sweeping generalisations here!

Not the apporopriate place to go into a detailed marketing strategy, even if it was I don't possess the know how to do so. Just some observations that I have made over the years from living in Warrington and elsewhere in the country.

I live in Whittle Hall but grew up in Burtonwood where most people supported Skints. These days I coach a junior side in Burtonwood and out of the thirteen nine year olds we have all are Warrington supporters apart from two. The profile of our club is far greater than it used to be.

We do not lack support (see the finals and the homecoming parades for evidence) but we can't lock this support into coming every week. That should be the focus of marketing.

I meant to post about Burtonwood but my mind went off on a tangent. Obviously the place may as well be in St Helens for what it is worth, but I have noticed the past couple of years ago when I go past the field on Fir Tree Lane you see a lot of Wire shirts which is encouraging. You see more about Whittle Hall too, which you didn't really get at all ten years ago. Like you say they need to build on all this.