Digital and social media poses the biggest marketing challenge for FC Barcelona, the club’s CMO, Lander Unzueta, has revealed.
Barcelona hosts one of the largest Facebook groups for any football club with 1.2 million fans. It also operates an active Twitter feed.
But as technology advances Unzueta admitted there was a problem posed in how and where best to reach young consumers.
“Digital and social network is probably the most challenging thing that we have to face, and, by all means, we are doing our best job on that because we feel that young people, now, they are more with a handheld device and with a TV and a computer than probably as a newspaper, a physical newspapers, and classical TV that we had in the past,” he said, talking to meethteboss.tv.
“We want to be pioneers in football. This is our core business. But we have to look what other elements interests our fans and our members. And we realise that social networking and digital media, it is important, and we are on that.”
Unzueta added, “We have thousands of [Twitter] subscribers that we follow. We try to use social media them those elements on how our players are doing, what our club is doing in the sense of an institutional.”
The FC Barcelona CMO went on to say that social media users in Middle East, China and Africa were the most active.
“Every time in the Middle East I come back impressed and astonished. They know our statistics and our players much better than myself, at least. Many countries, also in China and in Africa, they are big followers and big developers on the social,” he explained.
“Sometimes time changing doesn’t allow [them] to be able to see a match live, but they are able to follow it through Web, through Internet, through Twitters and Facebook, Middle East and also in China with big, big developments there.”
Developing the club into a brand has opened up a raft of opportunities globally.
“At the end, our goal is to increase our brand value. FC Barcelona ‘More than a club’ brand, this is the most important asset that we have,” said Unzueta.
He added that the brand positioning was determined by how many millions the club was generating in income, which in turn determined which players the club could purchase.
The players and value of the club brand then determined how much income was generated though club shirt sales. According to Unzueta, top clubs can generate around €20-25 million per annum from shirt sales alone.
“But at the same time, we’re seeing more and more that the stadiums are having commercial naming rights,” he added.
“But on top of those two, of the jersey and naming rights, I would say that being a multisport club… makes a difference. If you have 13 different sports like we have - 5 out of the 13 being at the professional level in competition internationally - that makes a difference.”
The global reach of the club now meant that is was having to reassess its KPIs beyond revenue.
“For us, from a marketing perspective, the income and the revenue are the most objective things that we are looking [at]. But there are number of elements that, lately, a number of companies are able to follow, which is the expansion that we’re having internationally,” explained Unzueta.
“So the way that we have the visitors that we have in our stadium, we have almost 1.5 million in our stadium. Our museum that you will be able to see is the second largest museum visited in Spain.”
He concluded, “But to have almost 300 million fans across the world, to see that every year we more countries and more fans in Asia, in Africa, in the Americas, that’s something that, for us, is a good metric.”
For the full interview visit, meetheboss.tv
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