Social Activism?

By: Melissa | September 17th, 2009

In the past, I’ve ruminated or rather thought out loud the question of how this league can be all about gender yet market itself as mostly genderless. This idea is apparently the topic of a little e-fight going on between Wendy Parker and someone who refers to themself as the Fake Sigi Schmid (I suppose someone’s gotta be him). Basically, Parker argues that WPS should steer away from marketing itself as a social cause which irked Fake Sigi and the fake one (not to be confused with the special one) wrote an admittedly very eloquent post explaining the point. Alright, I’m gonna paraphrase. Here we go…

Parker: The WUSA folded partially because their overt “girl power” message turned off potential ticket buyers. Furthermore, this recession is hitting niche sports markets hard so the bottom line is more important than ever.

Fake Sigi: The WUSA folded partially because they jumped on the “girl power” bandwagon as a last ditch effort to save the league after they ran out of money. WPS is working to distance itself from the failures of WUSA by starting out as a more grassroots business model and by not marketing themselves as a charity case, or as Andy Crossley said, “the ghetto of being a role model for girls.” (great quote!) So what WPS can do is embrace cause-related marketing which is apparently an actual term that defines businesses that align themselves with social causes by raising money, creating volunteer opportunities, raising awareness, etc etc etc. The point being the message targets the company’s audience emotionally. We all feel a bit better about spending our money on you because you care about the same issues that we do. Fake Sigi also argues that – well – WPS is struggling to understand their core demographic market and cause-related marketing is a good way for them to figure it out before they lose all the fans.

What can I say, I’m nowhere near as eloquent or S.M.R.T. but I do agree with the fake one. And one of my employers just happens to be a organization at the forefront of this cause-related movement. Over the years, I’ve seen their funding shift dramatically from 100% philanthropy to now majority business partnerships and their list of clients is really becoming a who’s who of the Fortune 500. What Fake Sigi writes is no joke. WPS can benefit from league-wide and strategic social cause marketing because that is actually what many consumers want. And don’t even get me started on the demographic woes of the WPS. It’s enough to make me stop caring about this league altogether. The mixed message of yes this is an important thing for women’s sports but no we aren’t going to talk about it might just backfire because the league’s core audience, who the fake one calls “athletic minded women and girls,” may very well want WPS to talk about it!

Well, I’m no expert on the subject and it seems pretty apparent that this is new-ish mostly unchartered territory (srsly, how many professional women’s sports leagues are there?). And I’m typing this while sitting at said job mentioned above while at the same time testing mysql backup programs. Stay tuned while I pull together my thoughts on why WPS should completely ignore television and broadcast everything online as well as keep all video archives available on their website on-demand. That’s right – control the means of production!