I bang on about positioning quite a lot, and that’s because it’s one of the most fundamental aspects of strategy for any brand or business.

In most sectors, this is readily accepted and embraced, but in sport it often seems to be overlooked, or at least taken for granted.

Why is this?

I think it’s because in many cases sporting brands (whether teams, leagues, NGBs, federations or events) have been around for a long time and just assume that their intended audience is already pretty familiar with what’s on offer.

“People already know what we are, so we don’t need to bother positioning it to them. We just need to make them more aware of it, or come up with a better promotion.

Sure, most people do have at least a working knowledge of what most sports involve, and this approach might work for those at the top of the tree (the ones with nice TV deals and endless media exposure).

But I don’t think everyone else can rely on that.

In the famed “attention economy”, where sport is not just competing with other sport, but also with gaming, social media, Netflix, YouTube etc, etc…we need clarity, we need differentiation and we need consistency.

This means going back to the fundamentals of positioning, and treating your sport/team/league/event like a proper brand.

– What do we want our audience to think about, when they think about us?

To get to a good positioning requires a good understanding of your target customers/audience/fans:

– Who do we actually want to target? What do they think, want and need?

It needs a solid understanding of your competitors, and not just the obvious ones.

– What they are offering and how they are positioned? Is there some ‘white space’ we could occupy?

And it needs a really honest appraisal of your own product:
– What is our core business? What value are we really offering? What’s genuinely different or better about it?

Put those three elements together and you can create a clear and distinctive positioning that neatly captures the essence of what’s on offer.

And from this, everything else can flow: narrative, brand voice, messaging, tagline, visual identity, creative campaigns and all the different marcoms tactics to cut through to the people you want to reach.

But there is no point in fixing the tactics if the strategy isn’t in place.

Start with positioning.