Weekly Newsletter 12/1
Sign up below to stay up to date on the sports stories changing our industry
Innovation in Action
Sports Fans Go Shopping🛍🛍
We hope everyone had an enjoyable Thanksgiving holiday full of food, family, (every kind of) football, and some shopping. According to reports, online Black Friday shopping set a new record this year with sales expected to stay strong through Cyber Monday. While consumers typically look for deals on electronics and clothes during Cyber Monday, we started to wonder how sports fans spend based on the industry’s seasonality depending on the start or end of a sports season.So, which sports fans have historically taken advantage of Cyber Monday, and which sports fans flock to online retailers for the first time during this holiday?
Let’s take a look at Fanatics , a massive e-commerce company, selling a variety of officially licensed sports merchandise directly to fans. Given their position in the industry, their sales can help indicate which sports fans are showing their fandom through merchandise, often a cheaper alternative to being a sports fan compared to buying tickets.
*Our data comes from a random panel of 10 million credit & debit card holders in the United States. Transactions portrayed here are from 1/1/2020 through 12/1/2022.
While we anticipated Cyber Monday being a huge life for Fanatics, a few things stand out to us:
In 2021, Cyber Monday purchases from Fanatics are mostly dominated by basketball fans.
Second, Championships often drive the second spike. Going further, July 2021 shows a massive spike in basketball fans flocking to Fanatics right around when the Milwaukee Bucks won their title.
As much of an anomaly 2020 was, some of the same trends held true, just a different time of year. In 2020, baseball fans took the top spot among all transactions on Cyber Monday, as they did in 2019 as well. There was also a spike in mid-October by basketball fans, likely due to the COVID-delayed NBA Finals.
As much as we’d love to advise “just win a championship and sales will follow” we understand how unrealistic that is. If anything, two insights come to mind. Smaller markets can help drive massive volume at a national level. Secondly, since baseball has so many more opportunities to become a fan with double the amount of games than basketball and hockey, their number of fans can often be seen leading the way in many spend categories.
The public narrative is that baseball fans are the oldest fans among the major sports. We see baseball benefitting from the current spending population (Generation X). The next step for the sport is to attract the next generation of spenders (Millennials). This comes with innovation on all fronts, including revenue diversification, technology enablement, organizational agility, and more.
If you're ready to create breakthrough fan experiences and connect with the Fluid Fan through technology, visit our website sportsilab.com or email info@sportsilab.com!