The EchoUser Experience

Imagine an annual sporting event comprising 8 teams packed into 5 weeks followed intensely by a billion plus hysterical fans. That’s the Indian Premier League. This tournament is only 2 years old and is already considered the 5^th most valuable global sports property (at $1.6 billion behind the NFL, MLB, NBA, and NASCAR).

The IPL has taken the global cricketing world by storm and is already threatening to change the very nature of the traditional sport of cricket. One of the most important things that the IPL has done is to combine the concept of T20 cricket with a tournament format that provides a high-energy, intensive sporting experience to the billions of fans. The franchise model based on the popular American sporting leagues has given enough off-the-field entertainment as during the game to the cricket crazy nation of India. One of the glaring differences between an IPL match and any other One-day/Test match is the overall glamour and glitz quotient.

As Mick and Felix go about exploring the opportunity to evaluate a major league gameday experience in the US, I think it would be interesting to apply the same methodology and evaluate how the IPL games fares. Given the high stakes and the keen desire to grow franchise loyalty the gameday experience plays a very critical role. The Kolkata Knight Riders are already considered the franchise leaders in generating profits due to the high glamour that Shahrukh Khan brings in. Since not all teams can match up to that, new and innovative ways will need to be thought out to grow profitability over the course of time. I suspect the Gameday experience; something that has been taken for granted for very long would be a key differentiator in drawing fans to the stadia.

Mick and I had a great discussion last week with Ryan Howell, professor of Sociology at San Francisco State University.  Ryan is a friend of mine who recently got a lot of attention for his happiness research (and rightfully so), but recently he’s been focusing on something a little different: the ultimate “gameday” experience.

Funnily enough, EchoUser was contacted in the past about improving the gameday experience of a well known Bay Area stadium, so we definitely had a lot of things to talk about with Ryan. First of which was: what the heck makes up a gameday experience?

As a total gameday noob (I never went to games as a kid, since I grew up mostly in the developing world), it was fascinating to hear what Mick and Ryan, two avid game fans, had to say about the component parts of a gameday experience.  From a service design perspective the gameday experience is chock-full of interesting things to focus on, with dozens of potential “events” to consider and track.  Stay tuned as I cover our work with Ryan on improving the gameday experience of a Bay Area sports team, covering everything from an experience framework, to data gathering methodology choices, to event-based testing.