For the Fans
How a Fan-First Approach to Sports Is Taking Brands from Competition to Community
For The People are an independent agency who help organisations connect more authentically with people through strategy, storytelling and design. We believe that people are the reason, people are the challenge, and people are the answer. And that’s why we’ll always be For The People.
Although I was not genetically blessed with the coordination to play team sports, I geek out on how deeply universal and highly local sports are.
As I drafted this piece, my colleagues from the Australian state of Victoria had a public holiday for the Grand Final (an AFL, or Australian Football League, championship game). America, can we get a sports holiday or two!? My Kiwi colleague, James, was riding the high of (yet another) All Blacks victory over the Wallabies in the annual Bledisloe Cup (a rugby union competition) as he settles into Los Angeles (where we’ll have an Olympic games in just 4 short years!). And as I write this, I have WELCOME TO WREXHAM queued up on screen: kind of like a real life TED LASSO-esque docuseries about rebuilding confidence in a club (coincidentally, the club that Ryan Reynolds bought).
Successful sports franchises are built on bringing people together… and brands aren’t all that different.
Connecting people and place is something that’s been central to For The People’s work for years now — from the West Coast of Tasmania work we began in 2017 to our recent work with the communities in the Blue Mountains of New South Wales. But recently, as I chatted to my colleagues — the people of For The People — we kicked around the idea that staying close to people is one of the hardest things to do in the day-to-day running of a business.
One of the things that was most challenging for me when I was client-side leading brand was striking the balance between keeping an ear to the ground in the world of customers and doing the day-to-day work required to build the brand. Meetings, managing a P&L, hiring, board reporting — it’s all important, but it can be all-consuming.
One of the biggest risks we see brand and business leaders face is getting too inwardly focused — instead of thinking about where current or future audiences are moving. For lack of a better term, let’s call it ‘Inside Baseball’.
The Trap of Inside Baseball
‘Inside Baseball’ refers to expert knowledge, esoteric or highly technical language that’s only accessible to experts. It’s a trap that companies fall into when they stop looking into the stands (at their existing and potential customers) and only focus on the field (at their products or services): taking a ‘build it and they will come’ mentality worked for Kevin Costner in the 1989 hit film FIELD OF DREAMS, but unfortunately doesn’t hack it in the world of brand marketing.
It’s easy to understand how this happens. Commercial pressure, people issues, Meta algorithm changes — all of these things make it easy for a business to take their eye off the ball. The problem with getting wrapped up in issues inside the organisation is that it detracts resources and time from investing in building the right experiences for the right people. However, this must shift if businesses want to build authentic and sustainable brands that move people.
Sport (and Business): A Game of Constant Change
Nowhere do we see the pressure to adapt to the outside world more acutely than in sport. But we also see some of the most exciting, dynamic brands building followings and introducing new audiences to the sport. When we were talking in the studio about this, For The People’s Creative Director Nick put it this way: “Fans are desperate to connect with the players in their team in a real, normal way instead of through overly dramatic and slick productions — like Gogglebox meets football.” I think that sums it up: we’re all wanting authentic connection (with a bit of entertainment!) with the people on teams — not just the scoreboards.
This desire for connection is changing the sports landscape. Just in the last few years, we’ve seen:
Major League Baseball’s major changes to the game have dropped average game time, driven attendance up by 11%, viewership among fans 18-34 up 10.5%, and doubled youth sports participation to 16M in 2023. Source: Washington Post
New media like Jomboy Media, a creator-led media company building baseball hype among a younger crowd with personality-driven sports-related content among various platforms, including a YouTube channel of 2M+ subscribers
The rise of fashion moments like tunnel walks and player-run podcasts from the AFL to the NHL, as For The People Creative Director Patrick Carroll pointed out
A major running boom, with Strava run uploads up 4%, 20% more people tracking a marathon in 2023 from 2022, and 40% of the platform’s 87K ultramarathon participants last year being first-time finishers. Source: Fitt Insider
“I don’t love all the rule changes, but they seem to be making the game more exciting for fans, which is why we play — for our fans,” Cleveland Guardians manager Stephen Vogt said. Source: Washington Post
All this to say: people are fickle! We want to be entertained! Our goalposts are changing! We want the novel, the new, the exciting. That’s tough. But that’s also the game we’re in. And it’s a fun one.
As we say at For The People: people are the challenge — but people are also the answer.
One of the things we see most often in our work consulting for brands at For The People? Brands who successfully navigate the myriad changes in their industry, and focus relentlessly on their people, win. Winning brands embrace people in all of their messy, changing, raving glory in what I’m calling a fan-first approach.
The Solution to Inside Baseball: A Fan-First Approach
We see an exciting shift in sports that demonstrates the value of taking a fan-first approach to positioning brands for authentic connection, to attract new audiences and driving sustainable growth. A fan-first approach starts by asking what stories, experiences and connections potential audiences need in order to become fans of your brand.
Fan-first brands don’t wait for their market to come to them — they create unique markets by appealing to people.
What can fan-first brands do?
Fan-first sports brands give us a glimpse at what’s possible when brand managers go all-in on being focused on people. Fan-first sports brands can:
Build a summer college baseball team into a global phenomenon with a 600,000 person waitlist
Shatter global ultramarathon records and inspire millions of women around the world
Future-proof a well-loved ski resort in America’s West without erasing its authentic working-ranch heritage
Irrespective of the industry or category, branding can and should have a far more significant impact on your business than simply acting as a set of font and colour guidelines for your marketing function. Taking a fan-first approach requires making different decisions. These will be different across industries and are never one-size-fits-all, but these are some common shifts we see when brands move from inside baseball to fan-first branding.
And it’s a virtuous cycle, says For The People Strategy Director Claudia Henderson: “Taking a fan-first approach can actually inform the sport itself — and sport, in turn, informs culture. This is a delicate balance — while brands need to respond to fans, they also need to have a clear positioning that is owned by the whole organisation, from players to coaches and everyone behind the scenes.”
Let’s look at a few brands taking a fan-first approach:
1️⃣ The Savannah Bananas
Sports franchises can often retain fans — but attracting fans to a brand-new franchise is a completely different ballgame (excuse the pun). The Savannah Bananas (TikTok bio: “We Make Baseball Fun”) are a baseball team that have taken a fan-first philosophy and grown a summer collegiate team into a team with a multi-million dollar travel budget, a dedicated YouTube broadcast channel and a multiple-year waitlist for tickets.
The Savannah Bananas mantra? Fans first. Entertain, always. And that they do. The team hold an “OTT” meeting, where they ask themselves what’s the most over-the-top thing they could do in a game. And then they do it — from dances to lighting a pitcher’s glove on fire.
While other teams struggle to attract fans, the Savannah Bananas approach to completely rethinking baseball for the fans demonstrates that when what happens on the field is geared towards the fans, authentic connection follows.
📈The results:
The Bananas, as they’re known to fans, boast more than 8.8M followers on TikTok — more than any team in the MLB
The team hold a 1M-fan-long waitlist for tickets
A 285 game sell-out streak
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2️⃣ Lululemon Further
Women have not historically been included in the sport of running. Women weren’t even allowed to compete in marathons until 1972, and the sports bra wasn’t invented until 1977. Trail running is no different — it’s predominantly white and male.
Long a proponent of unlocking greater possibility and wellbeing, Lululemon developed a one-of-its-kind event that reached a completely new audience and got people talking about women’s ultramarathons (and Lululemon): a multi-day ultramarathon that begins on International Women’s Day and was designed to smash records (similar to Nike’s Breaking 2). This event acted like a beacon to attract a new audience to the sport (and introduce people to Lulumon’s new line of trail running gear), tap an underserved market, and position Lululemon to grow authentically and sustainably.
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Lululemon took a fan-first perspective that reflected their audience’s needs and reached new ones, inviting not just professional athletes but female podcast hosts, BIPOC advocates, models and coaches to compete, inviting creators with large audiences like comedian Laura Green, and forging partnerships with the Canadian Sport Institute to conduct a series of research studies to better understand endurance performance and human endurance performance in general (only 4 to 13% of sport science and sports medicine journals published studies were female only).
📈The results:
Pro-runner Camille Herron set all kinds of world records, including the women’s 48 hour, 300 mile, women’s 500K, women’s 72 hour, women’s 600K, women’s 400 mile, women’s 96 hour, 700K, 800K, women’s 500 mile, women’s 120-hour, women’s 900K, and the women’s 144 hour… my fingers are tired just typing that out…
📣From a fan: “There is zero reason I should think I could run for 6 days but then I listened to their stories and was like — I believe in us all! They are all so inspiring!!! I cannot get enough of this!” (Instagram)
📣From a fan: “So glad @lululemon has you there to bring all of us along on the adventure with the hot takes — you’ve helped me understand just what is happening here. And whoa these athletes are FREAKIN’ AMAZING and this is a wild event.” (Instagram)
3️⃣ The Steamboat Way
Steamboat, Colorado, is known as SkiTown USA: where 1 in every 134 people is an Olympic skier, and it’s home to 400 working ranches. But in Colorado, where there are 41 ski resorts, how do you differentiate from other ski resorts and attract an audience to embrace everything the ski town has to offer — not just in winter, but year round? Steamboat has invested more than $200M in a capital improvement project to transform the resort, with 650 acres of new terrain and even more improvements planned — including skate rinks, fire pits and live music stages. The goal? Preserve the area’s legacy while crafting a future as storied as its 60-year history — never far from its ranching roots and Western tradition.
Steamboat took an authentic fan-first approach that represented the resort’s family orientation, Americana and cowboy roots and rustic-meets-refined sensibility. There are plenty of places in the world that you can access phenomenal skiing, but what’s different here is the family orientation and connection to the place’s heritage.
Steamboat built a brand to match their infrastructure investment with beautiful storytelling, and a brand platform that can last for many, many seasons — truly expressing what’s special about Steamboat.
📈The results:
3-year-long campaign integrating cowboy poetry & cinematic ski footage
Launched at Warren Miller’s daymaker ski film tour
The Kansas City Chiefs
After two back-to-back Superbowl wins and Taylor Swift’s appearance at multiple games, it’s not hard to understand why the Kansas City Chiefs are enjoying a bit of a moment. But what may not be as apparent is that much of today’s hype around the team is very much by design, with a fan-first approach. “That’s what our North Star is. How do we make everyone around the world a Chiefs fan?” Chiefs CMO and EVP of Marketing Lara Krug told Marketing Brew.
What’s really fun to see is seeing the team throw out the category marketing playbook in favor of fans. The team will be the subject of a Hallmark movie, HOLIDAY TOUCHDOWN: A CHIEFS LOVE STORY, featuring none other than Momma Kelce (Travis Kelce’s mom and unofficial mascot of the Chiefs). The team’s livestreamed tailgate parties feature actors, comedians and influencers including SNL’s Heidi Gardner, and tight end Travis Kelce (and his mom).
📈The results:
On TikTok, the Chiefs are the most followed team in the league, with 4M followers
More than 1M viewers tuned into the Chief’s virtual ‘World’s Largest Tailgate’ last season
The team regularly rack up hundreds of thousands of eyeballs on “helmet off” content like the team’s ‘tunnel walks’ to the locker room
TLDR;
Sports are for the fans. Always have been, always will be. Teams that embrace this approach win fans — which we argue is perhaps even more important than winning on the field.
If you’re interested in taking a fan-first approach, or chatting more about brand or your fans, or you have a lead on some Savannah Bananas tickets, slide into our DMs here or drop us a line at hello@forthepeople.agency.