Seems wakey and Castleford have done enough this weekend to avoid being dragged into the battle for the spoon in 2012.

Powell has 13 days to feed off this positive energy

created by a last gasp win over widnes before the visit to Huddersfield, where we haven't won since 2003. Widnes are 300 points worse off than we are in the +/- column, so it's all about who will win again this year to ensure avoiding the dreaded last place finish.

Looking at our remaining fixtures, home matches against Salford and HKA together with trips to oddslum and Castleford would seem to be the games where we stand the best chance of picking up the 1 win that should ensure we don't finish at the foot of the pile.

Widnes will look at games v the same teams, plus their fixture v Wakey and target them for the win they need.....

as depressing as it is to be looking at the last months of the season with only last place "avoidence" to fight for, it could make for a bit of excitement at TW2.

No doubt the visits of Wigan and Leeds will attract the usual ex-pat northerners living in London as they normally do, but HKA and Salford are the games I'd really be pushing......

Salford: 2 weeks before the 2012/13 Wendyball season starts......

COME AND WATCH A LONDON TEAM STUFF ONE FROM MANCHESTER (or something along these lines)....

HKA: September 8th? Peter Sellars birthday.........He was in the Pink Panther......
Alecia Beth Moore Birthday.........you know her as PINK.....

How about a charity day for[urlhttp://www.wearitpink.co.uk/pay.aspx?gclid=CJn4jeHKxLACFQ4rpAodGkvYpg[/url ?

Everyone turns up in Pink, donate 10% of the gate to the cause, buckets being shaken etc.....get the Hull KA lot involved...NOW...not in a weeks time....

Just a thought?

I don't dispute the ideas as a method of generating interest. But how much actual money would you put into marketing these specific games? Would it not be more beneficial to target the bigger games in terms of marketing rather than focus on lesser games which quite frankly would need more sell than others?

In addition I would be interested in how much people actually think the club has a does use in marketing terms over the course of the year I suspect it is on the silly low side.

I would love the club to be able to attract 6,000 to the games v Leeds and/or Wigan, but getting spanked in front of say 1,500 new fans is hardly good for business........Salford and HKA we should at least be slightly more competative against...

LEEDS SL average = 4,449 and at the Stoop since 2006 average = 4,074
WIGAN SL average = 5,277 and at the Stoop since 2006 average = 5,019

Neither of these games "should" need major marketing to break 3,000 which this year is apparently seen as a good crowd.....both teams attract a fair amount of "local" support from London based ex-pats.

WARRINGTON SL average = 3,649 and at the Stoop since 2006 average = 3,573
HKA SL average = 3,415
To a lesser extent, these teams have attracted good gates in recent years and may well warrant some form of "reminder that they're coming" campaign....maybe a small piece in TNT highlighting the Australians in their squads?
The HKA/PINK tie in was after a lazy Google search for September 8th and associated events.........I still say it would be worth a pop, given the charity would get a fair amount of press on their own.....

SALFORD SL average = 2,692 and at the Stoop since 2006 average =2,561

If you look at the other "smaller supported" teams in SL and the attendances at the stoop this year, less fans than average have turned up for Catalans (30%), Huddersfield (39%), Wakey (20%), Widnes (36%) and Castleford (28%)......

Salford is a game I would push heavily to the local socccer clubs, posters in bars, get pubs involved in selling tickets, calling local businesses, 10,000 leaflets dropped at the nearest homes to the ground and loads of other stuff......but ensuring that it's stuff that involves something other than sitting on your ar5e booking an advert in a paper, speaking to groupon and posting on facebook.




4 Adverts in METRO (2002-2005), 3 Adverts in The Evening Standard (2002-2012), a number of facebook initiatives from 2008 onwards which resulted in free entry to games for the fans of Huddersfield an Castleford, the clubs intermitent Emails, Groupon cost per acquisition marketing deals taken up by the converted, a couple of lame "wear your soccer shirt for cheap entry efforts" some oyster card holders handed out at canary wharf, 2 videos seen by less than 1,000 people on-line, posters in pub toilets in west London for 1 season (200icon_cool.gif, 3 bus shelters in Brentford (2004), 4 x Door drops to houses in Brentford, leafletting of 1 Union game at Twickenham, exposure at the double header at Wembley and a dozen liveried Taxis.

To the casual observer, this may sound like a single campaign run by Saracens or Harlequins Rugby Union for an 'EVENT" game....it is in fact what I can recall in the way of marketing activity of the London Based SL club over 11 years



11 years and 143 "home" SL games since 2002........and by my estimation, about 100k spent on actual marketing...with another half a million wasted on marketing managers wages

It's says something when a woefully under prepared Widnes full of Championship players and journeymen rushed in are only just worse than you.

Thread drift.......

Indeed it does. Can we get any worse we ask. You do wonder that when Powell does go whether a new person can change these players back to what was on their cv when we signed them or we are in for another painfull season in 2013.

utter bollox

there have been 143 games and 143 - please-bring-a-friend-with-you pushes

If i brought my mate to a Broncos game, it'd be the last time i ever saw him.

Gutters- there may be very little money available for marketing.

It is possible that DH gambled on putting all (or most) of his Broncos money on the first team wages in the hope that success on the pitch would build the crowds. If that is the case, then as we know now, it is a gamble that hasn't paid off.

Snoopy - I have wondered the same as you whether there is a way back for some of our players. The team have not improved since game 1, imo, although a few players are coming up with decent individual performances. Question is, can any coach turn things around? A 7 year downward spiral has really knocked the stuffing out of this club and its supporters.

BTW, anyone see the Newcastle v Canberra game? Boy, were they two bad teams (reminded me of our match against Widnes) Wayne Bennett appears too have his work cut out at Newcastle and Danny Buderus looked a broken man when his team were booed off the pitch. Shame if his career finishes on an all-time low (Gower must feel he's under a similar threat here).

That's because he hates spending time with you.

45k a year for the 2 marketing managers since 2007..........not sure what chris warren was on, but there's potentially 500k since 2002 wee wee'd up against the wall.........
Sorry, but why spend 45k a year over 5 years on 2 staff members with 0% experience at promoting anything other than 2 unique and niche sports with a massive "occasional" following (Wimbledon/Test Matches) to roles that require a never say die, work 16 hours a day, die trying attitude? We are the square peg and the round hole is the audience in London....virl videos and oyster cards don't cut it.

Not sure what Chris Warrens experience was before the London Broncos...he was an excellent match day MC
and we at least tried door dropping on his watch...

If DH is not spending 10% of his supposed 1.5 million investment on promotion then he may as well save his money.....and before anyone says "it's hard to market crap"....we haven't been crap all the time since 2002.......and the rebrand was a 100% cast iron failure and waste of time, money and resource.....sub 5k for the first game at home....sub 2k for the next......alarm bells and P45's would have been the order of the day in any other professional organisation.......but this is London RL.

OR SIMPLY PUT
[urlhttp://viewtopic.php?f=27&t=430103&tsmp=1335136331[/url

So GF are you saying you couldn't sell tennis or cricket ? I'm not sure why selling Twenty20 cricket, for example, is fundamentally different to SL.

I could probably sell sand to an arab, but that's neither here nor there.

The point I made (or thought I had) was that the 2 Marketing managers the club have employed (both taken on by CEO's with Cricket backgrounds I would add) have done absolutely nothing to attract fans to the stoop. Cricket/Tennis don't make their bread and butter from weekly fixture crowds....International Tests and Wimbledon are their respective life blood.
T-20 IS ROCK'NROLL.......with a bit of cricket thrown in......it also has a MASSIVE ethnic following in the UK alone with dads wanting their sons to become Doctors or Tendulkar (gotta love social/racial stereotyping)....RL suffers from a totally different image in the publics perception....whippets and flat caps (see above

)

If there is no budget for marketing as DSWG has mentioned, then why waste the salary? If there is no budget...then why did the club tell the volunteers they were surplus to requirements? If there is no marketing budget in place, how do the club expect to increase awareness, ticket revenue, residual revenue and attract sponsors or investors?

Any company trying to attract "investors" (that's customers/owners/sponsors) needs to promote itself. Very very rarely has a product been that good that it needed no marketing and promotion to become popular.....but if David Hughes....and let's make no bones about this, it is HE who is running the club, has no interest of faith in marketing, then spending 1.5 million of his money on players is a total waste of time.

This club has historically failed to promote itself...it has been to 1 CC Final, finished 2nd, as well as making 2 play-off series. It has moved 5 times in 17 seasons and rebranded twice but it has never, ever, marketed itself properly.

Every excuse in the book has been rolled out by a series of CEO's as to why the club struggles off the pitch......I assertain that in the majority of cases, the #1 contributor to the failure to build the club into a self sustainable unit is a lack of understanding of what they have and how to market it together with what now seems to be DH's total mistrust of marketing.

For the club to survive with DH and his meglomania, it needs to be scraped back to the bare bones and employees taken on board who receive a % of their renumeration based on Results.......

Since we moved back to the stoop in 2006, about 275k has been spent on marketing managers wages, the same again on commercial managers....
Compared to 2005, the club has no shirt sponsor, sells no corporate hospitality and has about 30% LESS FANS AT GAMES.....that's about 1,150 less fans per game, just shy of 15,000 a year or 150k less in ticket Revenue and the same again in residuals



I know I repeat myself on an almost fanatical basis, but for some reason, even though the club apparently read what I have to say, they continue to muddle along as they have done since the birth of Superleague.

If the club believe that THEY KNOW BETTER then they are hiding the results pretty well....here's looking forward to a more fruitfull 2013 with hopefully competent employees in positions that count....Coach, Marketing Manager and Commercial Manager......the 3 most important at ANY PROFESSIONAL SPORTING CLUB

Quite difficult to follow your argument, its all over the place. I think you'll need to explain it a few more times

I was talking about this season Gutters...maybe there isn't any money left over to spend on marketing this year.

We can all guess the financial situation of this club is dire and I'm just suggesting that DH may have spent all he wants to spend (which would also account for RP not being replaced by another coach). We may not like it but this could be the hard truth. (the Hickey debacle won't have helped)

I wouldn't blame DH for not wanting to spend another penny on this club. It's too tough and whether it's his fault or not, the disappointment of this year must be really hard to take. I know how disappointed I feel and I haven't parted with a million or so of my own cash.

TELL PEOPLE WHERE WE ARE, WHAT WE DO AND THEN INVITE THEM TO COME AND A HAVE LOOK.......

Bugger me...there's 13,500+ posts condensed into 18 words...

oh oh, here we go.





According to his facebook page, Chris Warren

University of Western Sydney
School year 1992 · Marketing · Bachelor of Commerce · Sydney, Australia

So he has qualifications in marketing. A bit like yourself.

I know.....after 11 years of steadfastly ignoring my ideas whilst shedding fans, you'd think that they'd at least pay me some lip service.....oh, hang on


That's why Gus got in touch......they thought I'd calm down one they pretended to massage my ego




Nope....unlike Mr Warren, I got my qualifications after spending 8 years selling to and being seconded to marketing agencies......before that I thought they were all jumped up w@nk3rs.....in fact, even now, I still do


Mr Warren, regardless of what I think of his decisions, at least made an effort.....no matter how poor ot may have been IMO.

Bottom line, I reckon that the "fantastic 4" may well be the last roll of the marketing dice this year.....KEEP CALM, CARRY ON

We all really do give one that Gus got in touch with you. Talk yourself up fella. It's all about you remember. These forums are about discussion, not about the self-promotion that you appear to use it for.





So you have no qualifications then?

Yeah...I tout for business here



WTF is this about BTW?



The answer to your question is in the statement you were questioning....

Maybe you are a marketing tool GF

Is it just me who finds the idea of a Pink Day to raise our profile somewhat distasteful?

Using an emotive subject such as cancer to increase the club's woeful profile is just wrong, like all those washed up celebs doing charity tv stuff like Comic Relief.

Quins did this last season, but they are getting 10,000+ crowds so their aim was just to support a worthwhile charity and not generate media exposure.

You can't market a turd, so first thjing we have to do is pay off Powell, get in a good coach and push on from there.

I am amazed it's taken as long as it has for someone to point that out......

scroll back and read what I said afterwards.....it was a lazy google of September 8th...2 Birthdays associated with "pink"....as I said, Lazy.
Sorry if I upset anyone....