Creating an audience-centric beach volleyball sponsorship proposition

Challenge

Beach volleyball’s AVP (Association of Volleyball Professionals) stages and markets some of the most innovative and engaging sports events around the globe. However, it is still a challenger brand in the North American market, and therefore has huge opportunities to grow commercially, particularly in the sponsorship space.

Insight

Brands are increasingly demanding marketing opportunities that engage their target audience directly and measurably – requiring sports rights-holders to grow their understanding of who their audience is, and how to reach them. Over 90% of AVP event attendees do not register or purchase a ticket to watch an event, meaning AVP’s knowledge around its audience was limited.

Solution

Helping the AVP gain a deep understanding of the demographic, behavioral, and attitudinal make-up of its audience would – in parallel with the AVP’s plans to grow the number and engagement of fans across live events and digital platforms – strengthen the AVP’s attractiveness to potential sponsors.

Action

Two Circles executed the biggest representative survey of the AVP audience in the organization’s 30-year history, the results of which were analyzed to drive insight into key topics such as the perceived objective of AVP, interest in the sport and tour, drivers and barriers of attendance, preferred community events and tour shoulder programming, and best-fit sponsor categories.

Two Circles also created a single customer view of existing data held by the AVP by building a data warehouse of all customer and transactional data; analysis of this found a large relevance of the membership product for those interested in playing, but a huge opportunity in creating a compelling lifestyle-brand membership proposition.