A Winning Game Plan

By: Samar Farah

A basketball team turns to direct to put more fans in the stands

Its roster of young stars having nearly made the 2006 playoffs, the Orlando Magic basketball team was looking to continue its positive momentum, both in the front office and at the box office.

That’s when the team got an assist from Echelon Marketing Group.

Using a complex mathematical model, Echelon helped the team drive up season ticket sales and achieve some impressive marketing results. “It’s one of the best showings of any of our database marketing efforts to date,” says Magic database marketing manager Chris Watson.

In fact, the team led the league in new full season sales during the 2006-07 season, says Don Neal, president of Virginia-based Echelon. The Magic also made the 2007 playoffs, its first appearance in four years.

Echelon started with the Magic’s ticket-holder information, combined that with its own extensive database, and ran the sum data through its homespun methodology, which it calls the CAP index.

The result was a map of the Orlando Magic stadium during game time, with viewers grouped into three categories: those who could be easily up-sold, those who were weak prospects, and those whose up-selling potential was difficult to read. Armed with that information, the team put its telemarketing team to work, concentrating on the fans most likely to upgrade to a season-ticket subscription. As a result, the team was able to upgrade account holders into 37 new full season seats, jump-starting their partial plan upgrade campaign.

A color-coded map may not sound glamorous, but Neal believes Echelon’s style and philosophy – a reliance on numbers, complex computations and rigorous analysis – is in vogue because tighter budgets have all but eliminated corporate tolerance for marketing that isn’t hitched to ROI. And this is an area where direct has always had the home-court advantage.

“Direct and database marketing have never been sexy,” Neal admits, “but they’re increasingly getting more sexy.”

Neal says most of Echelon’s clients are on board with the importance of direct and database marketing, and can even provide their own robust databases. “Most companies have some level of sophistication,” he notes. But “that sophistication doesn’t get leveraged across the company.”

Still, it’s the proprietary CAP framework that Neal is most proud of. The acronym stands for three categories of economic consumer data: Capacity, Affinity and Propensity. Working with client-borrowed data and its own database, Echelon calculates prospective consumers’ capacity to buy a specific product, their potential affinity with a brand, and their propensity to buy a product at a particular time and place.

All three categories are important to the final index, Neal says. For example, a consumer who has just purchased a car may have the “capacity” to buy another but is unlikely to be in-market. That prospect’s “propensity” drops dramatically, which lowers his or her CAP index. By aggregating all three factors, Neal believes, the Echelon CAP index goes beyond typical geographic and demographic categories.

Neal hopes the CAP becomes an industry standard and a common technique to better target customers and prospects. And if all it takes is a little Magic to make that happen, then he’s already halfway there.