UFC Marketing Research

-

Marketing Research


Definition of Marketing: 
The action or business of promoting and selling products or services, including market research and advertising.

Event Marketing Planning: 
When planning an event, the organisers must have a clear structure of how plan it and which steps they are required to take in order to execute it successfully. One of the main Marketing tools, used in the event industry is the ''Marketing Mix'' by Booms and Bitner (1986):
Even though the Marketing Mix was conducted in the 80's. it is still relevant nowadays and is considered the base of event event planning process





In regards of the UFC fight between Ferguson and Nurmagomedov, we can begin the target audience analysis and work our way deeper into the marketing process and tools.

What is Target Audience?
It is a group of people who are most likely to attend the event. The segmentation of the audience consists of the following characteristics: 



UFC website demographic statistics
  •  Demographic: Age, gender, family size, income, education, 
  • Geographic: Country of living, city, population
  • Behavioural: Occasions, degree of loyalty
  • Social: Social status
  • Psycho-graphic: Values, lifestyle  

According to a fan base analysis on the UFC web page, the majority of fans consists of people between the age of 18-34 with high income. As for the gender ratio, according to Dana White himself, male: female stands around 75:25.
                                                                                                       




         

      From a Global perspective, the fan base segmentation is estimates to be:

''The following is a bit of envelope math using the American 18+ interest level (13%) as a foundation for adjustment and should only be taken as a loose estimate for the purpose of framing a conversation regarding the UFC/MMA fan base.

  • Americans 12-17 at 13%: 800,000. This group accounts for approximately 8% of the American population and assuming the same overall interest levels between adults and children (which is conservative considering that the interest level for MMA is likely to be higher for youth) we arrive at 800,000.
  • Canadians at 18%: 6,000,000. The sport has exploded in the country of 34 million people and the UFC’s interest levels in Canada far exceed that of the US in every demographic; 18% of the entire popular seems like a fair and conservative estimate, which gives us 6 million people.
  • British at 8%: 5,000,000. The sport is slowly picking up speed in Britain, but still not close to enjoying the interest levels in Canada or the US.
  • The World: 20,000,000. The rest of the world — including markets such as Japan, Korea, Brazil, Europe, Australia, and the Middle East — likely numbers into the 20 million range.
The above estimates would then put the global size of the UFC fan base at roughly 65 million. The growth potential is considerably higher, but that’s still a pretty solid number all things considered.'''
                                                                                              UFC fan base analysis (2018)

Now that the target audience is researched and segmented, we can move forward to the different ways the event is promoted world wide and which marketing tools are being used.

    Next step:
Traditional Media, also known as ''Offline Media'' 


Ferguson cover magazine
Khabib Nurmagomedov magazine cover




                                                                                                                                                









 It includes newspapers, posters, banners, billboards, flyers, radio shout outs, magazine articles, press conferences, etc. This type of event promotion relies on reaching out to high numbers of people to ensure the success of the event. According to 2012 Edelman Trust Barometer survey,  traditional media is still considered the most reliable news resource. 

UFC constantly holds press conferences with Dana White and the selected fighters who will go against each other in the Octagon. These press conferences boost the popularity of UFC, as well the fighters. Journalists have the opportunity to receive the latest updates on what is yet to come for the fighters. Often when both fighters appear at the press conferences, their constant bickering and trying to out-do each other might end up in quite the disputes or just a back and forward insults. Here are some examples:







UFC 222, UFC 223 Press Conference in Boston 2018








UFC 223: Tony Ferguson vs. Khabib Nurmagomedov Staredown - MMA Fighting 2018
Another method of offline marketing promotion that UFC does is putting the two fighters against each other for a stare down before the fight. It often leads to the fighters provoking each other and some times ending up in a fight, but thankfully in the case of Ferguson and Khabib, it was just an intense stare down: 

Comments

  1. Unknown21 February 2018 at 10:04

    Genuinely informative and interesting. I look forward to more!

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

-
Image
                            Social Media Marketing  Social Media marketing uses a variety of platforms to promote a certain event. In the case of the UFC fight, we can analyse the social media platforms of the company, of Dana White and the fighters. Through that, we can estimate how many viewers they have and how big is the impact of the social media on event promotion.   The immense success of UFC's Social Media Marketing Tools, has helped expand the further in other countries such as Brazil, Japan, Australia, etc.  You can see in the previous post in regards of ''Traditional Marketing'', a few screenshots of press conferences. They were retrieved from UFC's YouTube channel, which shows the marketing combinations used. Due to many people not being able to travel abroad for every event, the YouTube channel makes sure to keep the fan base and the reporters/journalists updated with the ev...
Read more

UFC results

-
Image
As you were probably able to see, the UFC 223 title match was a chaos. Of course, as mentioned in the previous posts, changes due to injuries or health issues can occur, but considering it was last moment, I was surprised how Dana White (refer to 1st post for bio) was able to arrange everything and despite the negative comments, which you can see in my previous posts, he was able to find a fighter for Khabib Nurmagomedov. Khabib vs Al LAquinta, MMA Fury Website (2018)  The fighter was Al Laquinta, an American MMA fighter, who has been a professional fighter since 2009 (according the Official UFC website).  The outcome of the fight was as expected: Khabib Nurmagomedov won the title and the belt of course. So thankfully, now I can in a way make a closure on this event that focus a bit more on ''Afrika Burn'' and make the comparison that has been eagerly awaited.  Dana White kept everybody posted, as well as many official UFC journalists and UFC supporters. There wer...
Read more