Manchester United - A Marketing Analysis
In this blog, we will discuss Manchester United’s marketing efforts using the following marketing concepts to analyse them: the marketing mix, segmentation, marketing and positioning and marketing research.
Marketing has many definitions and whilst not one is widely agreed, it is most concisely defined as ‘managing profitable customer relationships’ (Kotler & Armstrong, 2014).
Sports marketing is a more focussed version of marketing solely marketing sport. Again, although there is no widely agreed definition like marketing in general, ‘the use of sport as a promotional vehicle for consumer and industrial goods and services and as the marketing of sports products, services, and events to consumers of sport’ (Evans, James, and Tomes 1996) is the most acceptable and elastic concept of it.
Sports marketing is very unique because it is in such a large industry, you can do the process of marketing of sports or marketing through sports. Marketing of sports is the practice of marketing as it occurs within a sporting organisation and how they communicate with fans (customers) through various mediums. (CRM) Whereas marketing through sports is where a non-sport product is marketed through an association to sports because it is such a big industry. Large corporations use sport as a vehicle to promote their products and services. (Kaiser and Breuer, 2018)
Marketing Mix
The Marketing Mix includes multiple areas of focus as part of a comprehensive marketing plan (Kenton, 2019). To analyse this in further detail, it can be classified into 7 P’s, which are: Product, Price, Place, Promotion, People, Process and Physical Evidence, but the club mainly benefit off three of these.
The first analysis will be on the product element of the marketing mix. The overall product of Manchester United is the team itself (Bhasin, 2018). They sell a wide variety of merchandise, in which the main revenue maker is replica shirts which can be personalised, to maximise revenue, the club sell different variants of these, such as: home, away, third, goalkeeper and training kits and also offer special merchandises for women and kids (MBA Skool Team, 2020). This is great for the club as they are expanding on different revenue streams and can capitalise on demand from loyal customers with their price inelastic products.
With regard to pricing, Manchester United tend to use premium pricing (MBA Skool Team, 2020) on all of its products, specifically on rising costs of merchandise and the expensive cost of a season ticket, ranking as the fourth most expensive season ticket in the English Premier League in 2019/20 (Lange, 2020). They are able to do this because they have such a large global following with an estimated 1.1 billon fans worldwide (Fay, 2019) and so the popularity combined with fan loyalty allows the club to charge premium prices and be extremely profitable off such.
In terms of promotion, Manchester United offer exclusivity and premium content to its fans to make it more appealing to access. For example, they have their own TV channel, MUTV, where they broadcast academy and pre-season matches, exclusive interviews with players and staff and documentaries about the club (Manchester United Communications Department, 2020). They also have the Man Utd app, where you can see news and videos, scores, polls and exclusive quizzes (Man Utd, 2020). The club also use their website and newly formed YouTube channel to offer more ‘exclusive’ content for its fans.
These services are all covered in adverts for either the other services, merchandise or anything that the club. Monetise and can make money from, they are trying to become more of a conglomerate and are using parts of industry 4.0 to profit off it and grow and further monetise the business.
The club also use its star players to market their products, because if a fans favourite player endorses a product, they are more likely to purchase. The club also cleverly market their global players, particularly those where they don’t have as monopoly in the market as locally. This is evident in the past decade with players such as Shinji Kagawa and Javier Hernandez, where the club organised a pre-season tour in their respective home countries (Bangkok Post, 2013) which went extremely well, they gained an increase in merchandise sales, website traffic and an increase in brand awareness.
Segmentation, Targeting and Positioning
Market segmentation is defined as aggregating prospective buyers into groups or segments with common needs and who respond similarly to a marketing action (Tarver, 2020). Manchester United have to segment millions of people across the world who love to play or watch football (MBA Skool Team, 2020).
Manchester United focus on all of their huge global fanbase and capitalise on it to grow their social following. An example of this is during summer 2016, when the club were on the verge of resigning Paul Pogba, and so the #POGBACK campaign was born. The club’s media team knew this had huge viral potential, announced the transfer at 3pm GMT. This meant that it was easy for local fans, fans in Asia were still awake and North Americans would be just waking up (Gregory, 2016). This move paid off as it became the club’s most interacted with tweet at the time, with 54.2k likes and 81.3k retweets (Twitter, 2016).
A target market is defined as a group of potential customers whom a company wants to sell its products and services (Kenton, 2020). Manchester United, predominantly, target men over the age of 15 globally (MBA Skool Team, 2020).
Manchester United target their global customers by having different social media accounts for different languages. For example, they have Twitter accounts in Spanish, Indonesian, Japanese, Malaysian and Arabic (Twitter, 2020). This helps target their global fanbase and caters to these different audiences which makes these fans feel more aligned to what’s going on at the club and will have more chance to access more content, possibly monetised which the club could profit off.
Also, when the club tweet out the team before a match, within the tweet is a link to the club’s app, which helps drive up interactions and downloads for the app leading to the club developing a bigger customer base on the app to target certain ads to. (Twitter, 2020)
Market positioning refers to the ability to influence consumer perception regarding a brand or product relative to competitors (CFI, 2020). Manchester United position themselves as the world’s biggest and most popular football club (MBA Skool Team, 2020).
One way the club like to maintain the image of being the biggest club in the world is hiring the best staff in the world, for example they hired Nick Speakman to be the new Global Head of Social Media in August 2020 as he had taken his old business Sporf from zero followers to 15 million across social media in eight years (LinkedIn, 2020).
The club are also trying to become the most popular football club on all of social media, and this is present as they recently made a YouTube channel which is the fastest growing sports club channel to ever launch on the site, #MUFC is the most tweeted sports hashtag ever (Manchester United Investor Relations, 2020) and they created a TikTok account on the 30th October and have amassed 353.8k followers (TikTok, 2020).
Marketing Research
Marketing research is defined as the process of determining the viability of a new service or product through research conducted directly with potential customers (Twin, 2020).
One way to conduct this marketing research is through a SWOT analysis, which is analysing the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats to the business.
Manchester United have a huge global outreach and fanbase, which is their biggest strength. They have tie ups with fantastic sponsors such as: Adidas, Chevrolet, Kohler, Aeroflot, Aon etc. (Man Utd, 2020) which expands their customer bases by reaching more audiences than they usually would. They are also one of the richest sports teams on the planet and have the biggest stadium capacity in the Premier League (MBA Skool Team, 2020) so they have the ability to be extremely profitable due to the fact that their tools to market and operate are greater than most in the world. They also have high quality merchandise which helps ensure repeat purchases and have a strong brand loyalty, however this is no different to competitors and is normal for a football club.
The club don’t have many weaknesses, but the main one is that the club has a huge level of debt and loans that need to be repaid due to the Glazer takeover in 2005, their overall debt adds up to roughly £473 million as the impact of COVID-19 has made the debt soar by 133% (Duncker, 2020). The repayment of these loans takes up an enormous amount of Manchester United’s profits, and it is not being paid quick enough, so it will only keep mounting.
There are many opportunities to help Manchester United grow its brand, with the best way being tapping more into global fanbases, particularly in India, China and the US (MBA Skool Team, 2020). These are countries whereby football is an emerging market, and growing rapidly, and so if the club ramp up their marketing efforts in these countries, they can gain new fans who could end up buying merchandise, tickets and hospitality experiences. which could help pay off club debt.
The main threats to Manchester United are all linked to financial issues. The biggest one is letting the debts pile up and keep paying expensive fees for player transfers, and the club being plunged further into debt and not being able to pay them off. This is only exacerbated by the recent COVID-19 pandemic and it not allowing certain revenue streams to grow or even exist, i.e. matchday. The final threat is that if the current disappointing on pitch performances continue, then this could lead to less central payments from the EPL and further incur the huge debt they have (Premier League, 2019).
Guidance to Improve Future Marketing Output
Firstly, the club should create even more twitter accounts all for different languages to help tap into new emerging football markets like India and China which would help them gain a following there. This is a free way to build their global fanbase and this could lead to these new ‘fans’ buying merchandise or tickets to games when they are allowed to, especially so if Manchester United visit their country for a pre-season match. We saw an example of this in 2014 whereby United faced Real Madrid, who are two of the most widely supported clubs on earth in America, and all that you could see in the stadium was the red of Manchester United (Flanagan, 2020), proving that their USA based marketing was proving successful.
The club could also do more to help quieten down the ever-present protest of the ownership of the club by distracting these fans. They can do this by providing more content to be consumed, that offers exclusivity and positivity.
Conclusion
In this blog we discussed how Manchester United’s current marketing efforts have been extremely successful and that they successfully continue to position themselves as the biggest and most popular clubs in the world, and that they act like it off the pitch. However, they need to pay close attention to on pitch performance and be careful that it does not affect their future marketing output. We also discussed how the club should build on the fantastic global fanbase that they have built and continue to accommodate these fans and grow further into emerging markets.
How would you improve the marketing of a football giant?
