Back in the late 90s I was a judge for the UK Service Excellence Awards. Sponsored by both Management Today magazine and Unisys, the aim of the scheme was to recognise customer-centric businesses: those designed around the needs of their ‘customers’.

The rationale for inverting the traditional hierarchy (where the chairman and the board sit at the head of the table and customer-facing colleagues sit at the bottom) and locating the customer in the top chair (with everyone else serving them) was simple: commercial growth.

You may have the best product, the best prices or the fastest delivery but all of these can be superseded by a competitor.  But the best customer experiences lead to emotional loyalty from customers. Your price may go up or your functionality may decrease, but the customer’s enduring emotional investment will prevail.  That investment is worth a fortune in saved marketing and customer retention costs and also generates a fortune in recruitment driven by existing customer advocacy.

Service excellent businesses design their organisations around four or five key strategic dimensions. They are commonly vision, values and leadership; employee engagement; customer understanding and service delivery. The key KPI is always customer-driven. The number one item on the board agenda is customer satisfaction and the key driver for reward is customer advocacy for the business.

In football – and other major spectator sports – there remains a belief that what happens on the field is the key determinant of engagement. The more we win, the more people will turn up and, conversely, when we go on a run of defeats, numbers will drift.

That credo has naturally produced a culture where fans are never more than the second most important thing at a club – and that flies in the face of the strategies of the world’s fastest-growing businesses.

What would happen if we put the fan at the centre? What might occur if we designed our club around two equally important principles: the dogged achievement of sporting glory and a belief that, without fans, the club is nothing? How might things change if our interpretation of fan engagement was ‘everything we do to understand, to protect and to grow the fan’s emotional investment in the club’?

We will shortly be publishing analysis that finally puts paid a ‘fan comes second’ philosophy and underlines the strategic value of fan centricity.  For we now know that those clubs delivering the best quality fan experience are growing attendances at a rate that outstrips the rest.

However, it would be a fallacy to draw from this the conclusion that it’s only about the fan journey because without a strategic approach, the business case will falter.

The balance needs to be reset.

We need to challenge the notions that are taken as given in football such as the reliance on marketing, communications and digital as the sole drivers of attendance. Sure, we know that a good campaign will raise awareness and that a ticket offer will add a few to the attendance. But that’s all irrelevant if the experience is poor. Irrelevant and hugely costly to the future viability of the club.

The 25% increase in attendance achieved by a tier 4 club’s strategic focus on fan experience since the pandemic has exactly correlated to the improvements made in the quality of the fan experience in that time, despite little change or improvement in their league position for almost all of the same period.

We calculate that to be worth over £300,000 to the club (factoring in additional ticketing and secondary spend-per-fan). And that’s just now. Imagine the life time value of those fans to the club.

The cost of ignoring fan centricity as the only realistic attendance growth strategy is huge.

Why not do something about it?

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