Who are College Sport Fans?

I know I have talked about marketing segmentation in a previous blog, but my interest in this has increased throughout this class as well as my marketing 409 class. In this blog I will dig deeper into the bases of Marketing Segmentation. I will identify the meaning of segmentation, the purpose of segmentation, and the demographic statistics for marketing segmentation in college sports.

Market segmentation, as defined in class is dividing large groups of consumers into smaller groups based on similar wants and needs. After dividing consumers into groups, you can develop a marketing mix for this specific group. The purpose of segmenting is specialization, concentrating on specific customer needs, and developing promotions for specific groups of people. Market segments are created by dividing groups based on four factors: demographics, psychographics, behavior, and a hybrid segment. Each is truly important in developing the right marketing mix for the right group of consumers. The one I will focus on is demographics. “Demographics are data used to refer to selected population characteristics, used by the government, in marketing, and in opinion research” (this definition is from getbrandwise.com). There are many different aspects when talking about demographics in marketing segmentation. These aspects include age, gender, ethnicity, income, family life cycle, and geographic locations. 

For this particular blog I did some research on the demographic characteristics of college sports fans. Most of the information I am going to present came from the Learfield Sports website.  The age demographics for college sports had little variation; in fact the range had a difference of only 8%. The highest category was from ages 45-54 at 20%. Ages 18-24 was the group with the lowest amount of fans of college sports, at 12%. This number is very shocking to me. I figured that this category would be the highest due to the fact that these are the ages you attend college, and have an allegiance toward a specific university.  I would think many universities also sell discounted students tickets, which should increase the amount of fans at this level.  Gender, another aspect of demographics, is also important when looking to segment the market. Males make up 60% of college sports fans, while females make up 40%. These numbers are expected and are not very surprising when looking at the gender of college sports fans. I think that male fan numbers are so high due to the competitive nature of males as well as the greater number of males in collegiate athletics.  Ethnicity also had an interesting breakdown in percentages of people who are fans. The highest group, at 80%, was whites and the lowest group was Asian fans, at 3%. Only 13% of African Americans are fans of college sport. 13% seems kind of low to me due to the fact that a majority of athletes playing sports at the collegiate level are African Americans. The fourth aspect of demographics is income. Most fans of college sports are in the range of people who make 0-49 thousand dollars annually. The next highest percentage of fans is people who make 100 thousand or more. The two lowest categories were the ones that I would have thought would have been the highest. The people with the least amount of time and money have the biggest percentage of fans of collegiate sports. Family life cycle is another basis for looking at demographics. There were two different statistics for family life cycle, if you were married and were a fan and how many children you had. 59% of college sport fans are married. I think this statistic could be skewed and a little confusing. It is not clear if they are currently or were married at one time. Another aspect that needs to be looked at is what percent of Americans are married. The only statistic I could find on this was from the year 2000, when 57% of Americans were married. For parents with children, 30% of fans have one to two children where only 8% have 3 or more children. This I would think is mainly due to the amount of extra time parents have. If they have more children they have less time to pay attention to sports, and if they have less children they have more time for sports. The last aspect of demographics is geographic location. I could not find accurate data for this aspect. The best data I could find was on fans of just college football. The data gathered showed that most football fans were in the West and Midwest, both at 57%. I think this data looks odd in the first place because I find football to be much bigger in the south, than anywhere else. If you added all sports into the equation, I think you would find a greater shift of fans in the East due to the number of basketball schools along the east coast.

Demographics are just one way to determine how to segment the market. It is important to look at all the aspects and characteristics of market segmentation. Taking all factors into consideration helps you develop the best possible marketing strategies and mixes to reach the needs of all consumers.