Who Do You Market To?

By: Melissa | November 25th, 2008

The East Bay Rats are a motorcycle club from the East Bay, here in Northern California (i.e. Oakland, Berkeley, etc etc… the cities on the east side of the Bay Bridge). Every once and a while, the Rats put ton a fight night which is exactly how it sounds: sign up, get in the ring, and start punching your opponent. While I’m sure you, reader, might have romantical and perhaps bloody & disgusting visions of scenes from the movie Fight Club dancing through your head right now, I think it’s important to add that women participate in this event too. And if the success of the somewhat recent Rollerderby revival is any indication, there’s a market out there for – I dunno – a certain type of contact/physicality sport played by women, which at the same time, is viewed & enjoyed by both sexes. I think WPS can really take advantage of this.

So the whole idea for me to write this post stemmed from my experiences yesterday, in Los Angeles, post MLS Cup, in a park down the street from the Home Depot Center. The Riot Squad LA Galaxy supporters group put on an event with beer & food with Galaxy, Red Bulls, and Chivas fans attending. I was waiting in line for tacos and Peter Wilt mentioned how there’s interest from young & urban & dare I say hipsters, in the Red Stars team, but he wondered, after a game or two, will they stick around? Especially since the audience will likely include the “soccer mom” crowd: parents and their soccer loving little girls. Are we all going to be able to get along? I admit, at the time, I had no answers. But I was pretty drunk already since I threw back a few beers in the HDC parking lot with a seriously depressed Red Bulls fan before making my way over to that park. And to put the metaphorical icing on the cake, the Riot Squad hosted a bike jousting competition (it was exactly what you think). So I was also being encouraged to “break the glass ceiling” of bike jousting (I didn’t compete – sorry to let whoever is reading this down).

So what am I getting at here? Oh crap, I dunno. Here’s the deal… I read shit like LA Sol withdraw their offer to Marta oh wait, lie lie lie… that offer still stands and I know a significant number of international womens soccer fans wait impatiently for the answer. But I’d perhaps argue instead the biggest story of the past few days was USC losing to UCLA and subsequently ending the college career of Amy Rodriguez who I’m sure will be a top pick, if not the number one pick, in January’s WPS draft…

Right now, I get the sense that there are very many disparaging groups/markets/scenes of people who very well are or could be WPS fans. The question is whether WPS can get & keep everyone’s attention and translate that into tickets & sponsorship opportunities. If I can keep my shit together long enough, I hope to investigate this further. Stay tuned!