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Quote: bramleyrhino "Each club will have their own challenges, but in essence you go through that five step process.

I'd go about understanding the audiences that the clubs currently attract, the ones that they don't and, of those, the ones that I reasonably could attract.

I'd understand what those audiences are looking for in return for their leisure dollar, what their idea of a good evening out / family day out involves, and I'd invest my efforts in catering to that - whether that's facilities, experience or whatever. We previously had Bull/CougarMania and for all the stick that Toronto get about being a glorified beer festival, they've found an aspect of the matchday experience that seems to work.

I'd find the right marketing media to reach these people with those messages. Digital media makes it incredibly easy to target very specific segements of an audience, and that's something we can utilise without a massive budget or the right connections or school tie.

I'd be getting the sport, club and players in the media more often. We have so many stories that this sport can tell and yet, all we ever hear about is bickering amongst the CEOs, Chairmen and gobe pundits. Let's start telling the stories of the real characters. I'd be pumping out content, talking to the media and making it easier for journalists to run those stories - we have to do their job for them in many respects, because that way they're more likely to do our job for us. Brian Carney has spoken quite candidly about how hard it is for Sky, our biggest media partner and customer, to get anything out of the clubs once the central funding cheque had cleared - that's a complete failure of media communications and it has to change. There needs to be better dialogue with the media and if Sky want access to our players, we should be granting it with no questions asked.

I'd utilise tactics like CRM and marketing automation to reignite interest and keep audiences engaged. Clubs should have a wealth of data about their current supporters and those supporters who might have lapsed. Those clubs should know which of the former they could possibly upsell and they should have some understanding about how they can encourage some of their lapsed supporters to come back. Whether that is tactical offers (rather than blanket promotions like cheap season tickets that just give discounts to people who would have paid full price), or some other incentive - they need to be proactive on those audience segments.

But above all, there needs to be a clear USP. This is, admittedly, were it does need some centralised thinking but let's not forget that the clubs are now running the show. We used to call ourselves "a family sport", but that was basically just code for "we don't have a hooligan problem". In 2018, how many professional sports have a hooligan problem? The only one that did has largely cleaned up its act, whilst we are probably offering less and less what a 'family' expects from a day out at £20 a head.

We claim to be a fast, powerful sport, but we're hardly alone in that either. At the moment, this sport just doesn't stand out for anything, and it makes us less relevant by the day. I've used this analogy before, but the sport is being run by the commitee of a working men's club who can't understand why the function room is dead apart from Doris and her mates waiting for bingo, while the expensive cocktail bars in town are packed full of cool, good looking people paying £15 for a drink.

All of these are tools that the clubs largely have at their disposal today. My view is that they just aren't using them effectively. It seems that clubs are more than happy to pay to put some posters up around town and outside the ground, yet baulk at putting money into forms of promoting themselves that could be much more effective and measurable.'"