I'm not suggesting the RFL can't "invest in the game", not am I arguing that it doesn't have problems. But that doesn't absolve the clubs, who are private entities in their own right, from not marketing themselves properly.

The onus is on the clubs to grow crowds and ticket revenue, to sell merchandise, to sell corporate packages, to find new commercial partners, to expand their catchment areas, to find new audiences that advertisers want to reach and to increase their revenue.

I can't think of any other group of businesses where people expect somebody else to do their PR, sales and marketing for them, and yet rugby league clubs seemingly get a free pass from supporters.

McDonalds?
Every branch of this chain in the uk is a franchise with the corporate entity not only paying for, but rolling out a strategic marketing plan across all mediums



I can see a similarity with RL but we don't like to use the word franchising

Marketing costs are ultimately built into the franchise fee. The franchisees are paying for the brand, and McDonalds is reaping a direct proportion of the revenue generated from that marketing. The RFL, by comparison, isn't creaming a percentage of every club's ticket sale profits.

Like you say, if we want to get into a position where the clubs become "franchises" in the strictest sense of the word, it might be comparable. But I can't see many chairmen going for that.

Do you ever see football fans kicking up a stink at the Football League because their club isn't selling tickets, or do Sale Sharks fans blame the RFU for their empty seats? Why is it that RL fans direct their anger at the governing body, and away from the clubs? After all, it's not the RFLs fault that Salford can't sell tickets, or that Huddersfield have to sell tickets well below market value.

But the RFL profits are derived entirely from the work done by the clubs, in that if the clubs didn't provide the entertainment, there would be no RFL. As the governing body, there is a duty to promote the game they govern, using the money they have obtained from governing the game.

How a lack of proper marketing can be justified in the week that Nigel Wood trousers half a million quid from the game is beyond me.

I haven't disagreed with your philosophy regarding the cost of marketing, I've disagreed with your comment about no decent company adopting a centrally funded strategic marketing rollout



I have a slight marketing background but by no means an expert, but I would say that with a business model such as RL, I would have a strategic plan in place that involves the support of the members but controlled by a single entity, clubs just don't have the resource to employ a marketing professional, I doubt Coventry all golds could even afford me and I wouldn't be the best person for the role, however the RFL currently gets a big pot of cash from Sky/sport England and other income streams, some of that is paid out to clubs and some retained, IMO a % of that figure should be spent on marketing as in effect the SL Clubs (and other clubs) are actually paying it in to the RFL, then a fully costed marketing strategic plan be rolled out and supported by its members, much the same as say the "Respect" campaign that was centrally funded and rolled out to "All" clubs including amateur ones. I don't think that's a difficult thing to ask for or to gain any support. It just isn't going to happen if you ask 12 SL teams to do their own thing and then everyone else do nothing because they really don't have the cash/resources. It's has to part of the "BIG" plan, the overall plan to take the game forward, it has to be in the control and cost of the governing body.

The question is at what level the clubs are "providing the entertainment" at. The RFL could exist as an amateur sport, but I think we all agree that is not where we want to be.

The clubs (should) understand their own markets better than anyone. They (should) understand the markets that they want to grow into better than anyone and they (should) know how to engage those audiences. They are, at the end of the day, individual businesses with their own shareholders, their own investors and their own P&L. They should be capable of marketing themselves properly.

And when they realise their return on that investment (if they do it properly), we can have a better entertainment product, better sponsorships, better facilities and better youth development pathways.

Until then, the sport will continue this slow and painful decline.

I can understand the challenges for some of the smaller clubs, but lets remember that they're operating on a different scale. If the issues or poor marketing were confined to the lower reaches of the sport, then I think there's a fair argument for some wider central support.

But they're not confined to the lower echelons of the game. They're glaring at the very top. We have clubs that can't sell tickets without massively underselling them (remember Ken Davy's "biggest announcement in Huddersfield's history", which was a discounted season ticket?), we have clubs that haven't grown crowds in years, clubs that can't get eCRM right, have crap ecommerce systems and don't know how social media algorithms and content marketing work.

These aren't small part-time clubs run by volunteers. There are multi-million pound businesses with dedicated marketing and commercial teams.

Personally, I don't think that centralisation is the way to go for the reasons in my post above - the clubs are seperate entities, they have their own P&L, and should know their markets better than anyone else. What I would say is that yes, the RFL has a duty to market the concept of the 'competition', and in some areas it's actually not as bad at this as many people claim it is - although this year has been poor.

I personally do think that the RFL should be setting some stronger targets and KPIs for the clubs, and making elements of central funding performance contingent, but I don't see the clubs accepting that, and it would be hard to do without licencing.

But what this constant shifting of blame to the RFL does is perpetuate the problem. It makes people think that Barry and Eddie Hearn could solve the problem, when I think even they know that they couldn't sort this show out because it would need the complete and equal commitment from all 12 clubs - and they have never promoted a sport where they have to contend with that sort of power dynamic.

I've worked in marketing for a while and I've seen clients with many of these problems. If I thought that the RFL were really the reason why Salford can't sell tickets, why Wigan don't have an online store that works on a mobile device, or why Huddersfield can't grow crowds despite selling season tickets at half the price of their competitors, then I'd call the RFL out. But they aren't at fault for that.

But the RFL is the body who has negotiated contracts with broadcasters, to provide a platform. It is for the RFL to market properly with those broadcasters. It is for the clubs to attract fans locally who have been attracted to the club via broadcaster-led programming.

The complaint on this thread was about the lack of marketing for the season ahead. If, for example, Wakefield marketed heavily in Wakefield, what benefit does this have to anyone in, say, Warrington? None whatsoever. Game-wide marketing, however, would benefit every club.

The clubs do market locally. It is for the RFL to sell the game though. They are the governing body. Like the comparison made with McDonalds. The RFL provide the brand. But they are not.

Here's the disconnect.

The clubs are the primary point of consumption for the product. They are the ones selling the tickets, building the audience, and growing the game at a local level. In short, it delivers the "audience", which is the single most important word in marketing.

When the RFL goes to broadcasters and sponsors, it is selling that audience. That's what broadcasters and sponsors are ultimately paying for - access to the people that we talk to. In that sense, rugby league is no different to a radio or TV station - audience is everything, we have one, and we want to charge people to come and reach it.

So Wakefield marketing in Wakefield increases our audience in Wakefield, and Warrington marketing in Warrington increases our audience in Warrington, and so on. That, on paper, makes us more valuable to broadcasters and sponsors. But here's where rugby league has a problem. It's not simply an issue of numbers, it's an issue of quality.

Rugby League is predominantly played in towns where the local High Streets are full of bookmakers, fast food takeaways and pawnbrokers, and that's why our sponsors include online bookmakers, tinned mushy peas and pay day loans firms. It's not a coincidence.

The cost of advertising has been falling consistently for the last ten years. It has never been cheaper on average to reach people by the thousand than it is today. That means that the value of any form of advertising, whether it's TV, newspapers or sports sponsorships, is falling in real terms. For rugby league, that problem is even more acute, because the sport predominantly reaches what marketing people term "C2DEs", and the cost of reaching those audiences is falling at an even faster rate than the average.

Sponsors aren't interested in paying a lot of money to reach our audience - some because they can reach that audience much more cost effectively elsewhere, and others because they aren't interested in an audience that may statistically have less spending power than the audiences that other sports reach. That's why Betfred pays us £1m a year, and Aviva pays the RFU seven times that amount to reach (broadly) a similar sized audience.

That impacts our TV broadcast value, because part of Sky's calculations when it offers to buy the rights to rugby league will include the value of ad slots around RL content. One of the reasons it pays a lot for the rights to content like football, F1 and golf is because the ad slots around that content are extremely valuable. They're not so valuable for RL content.

So it's not just an issue of Wakefield marketing in Wakefield, but of Wakefield marketing to "the right audiences" in Wakefield (or indeed, outside of Wakefield). That's the biggest problem (and why I'm in favour of expansion). It requires clubs to look outside their postcodes, look at whether they offer what a family is looking for in a day out in 2018 (hint: sitting on a wooden seat with an obstructed view, paying £5 for a boiled burger and ing in an outhouse isn't it, but that's what many of our clubs still offer) and look at what they are offering to prospective commercial partners.

The clubs are really the starting point in all of this. The RFL can only really market and sell what they provide. They really need to look hard at what they're offering their prospective audiences, and how they can expand that audience not only so that they want to spend money with the club, but so that sponsors want to spend money to reach that audeicne. That, to answer your question, is how Wakefield marketing in Wakefield helps Warrington, the other ten clubs in Super League, and the clubs and game beyond.

You say that the onus is on the RFL to provide the brand. 'Super League' is the RFLs brand but as a fan, I don't buy "Super League", I buy "Leeds Rhinos". Corporations and broadcasters might "buy" Super League, but the only thing that Super League has to offer them is an audience, and so we're back to the clubs.

Is this going to be easy? No. It's not supposed to be easy. And it's not supposed to be cheap either. But the longer we leave things, the longer we keep deflecting blame and not doing anything, the harder and more expensive this is going to become.

You seem like a bright bloke Bramley and you clearly know more than me about marketing, so you must know that any company that's runs a fully costed P&L when budget cuts need to be made, it's the marketing that get cut first, it's because you can't put a value/accurate return on that investment and the accountants will win the argument in the boardroom, so any RL club that is struggling to make a profit is always going to have their marketing budget cut to the minimum, it therefore needs to be centrally funded.
Also you mention "multi million pound businesses" in a previous post, how exactly do you define that as me personally wouldn't count a business as "multi million pound" unless it's turnover was £10m+, on that criteria how many SL clubs have a turnover at that's level, also how many are less than half that, then tell me how many actually turn a profit

huddersfield only have 2 people working for them on the marketing front, boy does it show!

the marketing and commercial team will be much bigger at leeds and co, ken davy has to save some money in areas and this is where he tries to cut costs, cant blame him really.

It's a conundrum that I have clients coming to me with all the time and you're right, often it is the marketing budget that is the first to suffer at the bean counter's axe. However, its an argument that can be won and marketing is absolutely something that can be measured if it is done right, and has some clear objectives.

I get that things aren't currently easy for clubs, but my view is that they aren't making it any easier for themselves by failing to invest. There are lots of things that can be done without a huge capital investment - many of the problems are down to a failure by clubs to properly use the tools available to them - but yes, other things will need a bigger injection of resources.

But again, I don't think that it's the RFLs place to centrally dictate how 12 clubs in 12 different markets with 12 different financial positions and 12 different ambitions should be dictating how they market themselves. If that's the route we want to take, we may as well just have the RFL take complete ownership of all 12 clubs.

To me its a question of where this sport goes. Do we want to be a sport that keeps cutting corners, that fails to grow, that falls further behind our competitors, that keeps losing talent because we can't pay them their worth and keeps losing supporters, or do we want to be bold, take some calculated risks, and push to improve?

If it's the former, then we're opening ourselves up to some serious issues further down the line. There's a bloody massive construction project going on at Headingley as we speak. That project needs to be paid for, and it is going to need growth in order to do that. I can't imagine that Leeds, as one example, is going to be happy with the "stand still, regress and blame someone else" approach that many clubs seem to be happy with. We've already got two clubs voluntarily taking fixtures to Australia, we've got others doing work in North America - We're not that far away from the situation that the BDO found itself in the early 1990s.