A very interesting survey of connectivity’s impact on fans going to live events has surfaced a treasure trove of data points that are worthwhile for anyone in the stadium technology industry to peruse.
Conducted by Boldyn Networks, the survey is available for download and after spending a few days sifting through the results I can highly recommend it as too often we don’t hear the “voice of the fan” so clearly when we talk about stadium technology deployments.
Some very interesting data points could be found on topics like who fans blame for poor wireless connectivity — 42 percent blaming their network provider, 35 percent blaming the stadium or arena owner, and 15 percent blaming the home team or performing act. There were also very interesting questions about what fans might do if they had better connectivity and more information available from a team or stadium app, and what kinds of things they are looking for from an app or once they purchase a ticket. Here are a few highlights from the survey:
— 81 percent of event-goers would spend more if there were more convenient food, beverages or merchandise ordering options.
— More than half (57 percent) might spend more if they could order food/beverages from their seat.
— 73 percent would download an app that meant they could pre-order things at the stadium/arena.
— 85 percent of event-goers would like to be notified of ticket availability and upgrade their tickets to the event through a mobile app.
Here in the U.S. we have seen some teams rapidly responding to make the stadium and team apps a better place for services — our visit this past summer to St. Louis City SC’s new CityPark in St. Louis revealed perhaps one of the leading new strategies, where an aggressive promotion of online pre-ordering through the team app saw stands participating in the program net 20 percent of their game-day sales via the mobile ordering. Again, you can download the survey results to dig through them yourself.
Conducted by Lonergan Research on behalf of Boldyn, the survey was a 28-question online study of 6,138 stadium and arena event-goers in the U.S. (3,026) and UK (3,112) aged 18 or older. According to a press release about the survey, in the past 12 months 72 percent of respondents had attended a sporting event, 61 percent had attended an entertainment event and 32 percent had attended both.
