S1/E10: Storytelling or Storycreating?

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Season 1 / Edition 10

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CASE STUDY

“I don’t want following our club to feel like I’m constantly selling you tickets.”

That’s what Alex Wright, the Chief Creative Officer and Co-Owner of the pro soccer club Detroit City FC, said to me when he was talking about his approach as the team’s senior marketing leader.

Despite ticket sales making up half the team’s income (sponsorship and merch make up the other half), Alex and his marketing team of four are NOT hyper-focused on how this or that game is selling, because --

“Ticketing is ticketing. Marketing is storytelling. 50-60% of the time I want to be giving you good news about why you should support this organization.”

That “storytelling” goes far beyond how the players are performing on the pitch - it’s also how they’re interacting with the community (the club recently sent them to participate in local tree plantings and they attended Madame Butterfly at the Detroit Opera House) – or they’re sharing how their youth clubs are performing, what their supporters group is up to, or how they’re active in causes important to the community.

This is going beyond “storytelling” in that, in many ways, they’re creating the stories.  

It’s all to give the sense that the club is bigger than the team: something that makes sense for an organization really concerned with the social good they do in the community – and the idea that, when season ticket time rolls around, you don’t feel like you’re getting asked to give give $175 to a soccer team, but instead “you’re giving $175 to a community organization that does good”

The institutional narrative is primarily developed for and shared with their most bought-in audience, reached through their email newsletter, YouTube channel, and app – but is able to be easily adapted for what Alex calls their “algorithmic audience”: social media and traditional advertising.

And, despite Alex admitting he isn’t overly focused on game-by-game sales, his approach has been working: they were in the top ten in average attendance in their league for 2023 (which the BBC notes is “greater than plenty of clubs in England's League One.”)

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OBSERVATIONS

• So many arts marketing departments I’ve seen are forced by their business models to be totally engrossed in the show-by-show battle to maximize ticket revenue – I definitely cringed at the line “I don’t want following our club to feel like I’m constantly selling you tickets.” I thought it was instructive to see how this institutionally-oriented content marketing approach is applied in a place that’s also heavily reliant on ticket revenue.
  

• That “institutional narrative” is holistic: involving the games, the players, their youth programs,  their community work… and the potential outcomes are holistic too: potentially impacting tickets, program enrollment, sponsorships, strategic collaborations, and more. It seems to me that harnessing this kind of strategy would cross a lot of our traditional silos – what would have to change to see something like this realized in our organizations?
  

• I think they do as much “storytelling” as “story-creating” – as in the examples of the players participating in volunteerism and attending arts events.  Could we leverage artists in a similar way? From what I can tell, when the players are involved, this isn’t primarily sold to them as a marketing initiative, but as a perk (in the case of the opera) or team building (for volunteerism).
  

• An outcome of this focus is that they’re spending most of their time thinking about how to delight and reinforce connection with their most bought-in audience – and move people up the ladder into this category – rather than the “here today, gone tomorrow” single ticket buyer.
  

• Alex says part of this strategy is to use this content to “look more professional than the league we’re in” – so they intentionally try and mirror bigger-brand teams, who he says are trending toward repositioning themselves as lifestyle brands rather than sports teams. He named Venezia FC as an example of a smaller team using this kind of strategy to engage a much wider footprint than they otherwise would. More to come from me on this point in future editions.
  

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