The upcoming NFL season will include a couple of groundbreaking performances on the field. Notably, Sarah Thomas as the league’s first female official and Dr. Jen Welter as the league’s first female coach. However, the NFL has a much lengthier tradition of women in the front office, and the most successful team this century has one of the best. The New England Patriots hired Jessica Gelman back in 2002, and they have not stopped providing engaging fan experiences ever since.
She is currently the Vice President of Customer Marketing & Strategy, where she has embraced the role of analytics and technology in an effort to better understand the myriad of fans who root for the Pats. In her free time she is co-chair of the MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference. She is also a member of some of the most elite clubs in the business: Sports Business Journal’s “Forty Under 40” (for young executives who are shaping the future of the industry), Sports Business Journal’s “Game Changers, Class of 2012” (for innovative women in sports business), and Brand Innovators’ “Women to Watch” (for notable women on the rise in brand marketing).
I recently got to chat with Jessica about playing basketball, working for the Patriots, and how she has employed technology for the purposes of both marketing and customer engagement.
You were a point guard at Harvard and later played pro basketball in Europe: how good a player were you back in the day, and what was the biggest difference between college basketball and pro basketball?
I played on excellent teams: we were the 1st Harvard team to go to the NCAA tourney, won back-to-back Ivy League titles, and set a conference record for consecutive league wins. I was co-captain as a senior PG, so I was the floor leader and coach on the court of the team. I loved my college basketball experience and learned lessons about leadership that I have applied to my professional career. As a professional, it was challenging for me to live outside the US, and as a pro athlete the expectations on you are much different. Coming from Harvard I was used to spending a lot of time on the academic side, so I missed the intellectual stimulation while playing, but pro basketball was a great way for me to see the world and get to focus on basketball for the entire day. The pro game is playing 1-on-1, but I prefer the college game which is focused on finding the open man.
After retiring as a player and spending a few years in consulting you went back to Cambridge to attend Harvard Business School, where you had a business case assignment that paired you with the local NFL team: what was the most important thing you learned while getting your MBA?
Business school taught me the importance of taking opportunities seriously, investing in learning, and doing more than you think is expected of you. When our team was conducting the case study we did significant primary research speaking with other teams, as well as surveys to local alumni to understand the market. Our analysis was deep and thorough, so in my mind I was set-up to “make my own luck”, which sometimes works out and sometimes does not. I was not doing it to get hired: I just wanted to apply what I had been learning in school to the real world, so it was a culmination of realizing my strengths.
In 2002 you were hired by the Kraft Sports Group (an entity that oversees the New England Patriots, New England Revolution, Gillette Stadium, and Patriot Place) and eventually became Vice President of Customer Marketing & Strategy: why did you take the job, and what has made Mr. Kraft so successful?
I firmly believe in finding situations where you can learn, and the Krafts are visionaries who are incredibly entrepreneurial. I bought into their vision of managing a sports franchise like any other business. The Krafts charged me with pushing analytics and thinking about our business in that way. Plus, as a psychology major with an interest in people, I felt there was a customer-centric opportunity in our business. With respect to Mr. Kraft, he is an incredible person: he is very smart, family-focused, and analytically inclined, yet follows his gut. It is very rare to find someone like him because he is humble person who has also had such amazing success. Jonathan is an equally impressive person and they really compliment each other well as leaders.
You created an analytics-focused strategy for understanding and marketing to customers: how did you implement it, and what have you been able to learn about your customers?
Around 2005, after our back-to-back championships, we did not have a “single view” of our customers, so there was an opportunity to leverage the behavioral data that was starting to become available and understand our customers. In the beginning, we just wanted to limit duplicate communications and have centralized 360-degree customer understanding across our business. Now, it has expanded to track behavior from customer service issues to ticket payment to retail side to everything in between to get a true holistic view of the customer.
Two of the key drivers are retention (how can we keep season ticket members coming back each year) and revenue generation (how do we cross-market across our various business lines). We take specific efforts to engage fans in both of these areas. More recently, we have applied analytics to the operational side of retail with many new areas on the horizon. The opportunities are endless.
You constructed a database of several million names to ensure that your customers are happy: how do you provide customer service to so many people without turning into “Big Brother”?
It is now a list of more than 4.5 million names, but not all of them are day-to-day customers. The goal is improving the customer experience through improved targeted marketing and analytics to find out what is valuable to them.
You also conduct focus groups to learn what fans like and what they dislike: I assume these are not simply to discover that people hate paying $40 for parking that is a long walk from the stadium entrance?!
Correct. Our process is to gain feedback and perspective through multiple types of market research, including focus groups. For example, we recently wanted to understand the interest in a potential “field lounge” and see if it was viable as well as what people would expect out of it. We shared images (which brought the concept to life), then engaged on topics like amenities/pricing/etc. One of the great things about our organization is that we always want to be the best at everything we do, so we do tons of surveys to get feedback on problems and then try to solve them.
The Patriots recently decided to implement a variable ticket pricing system: how has ticketing changed over the past decade, and how do you think it might change in the decade to come?
Variable pricing is valuable because you can see the actual market value of a game. Variable pricing makes sense: our home opener as defending champions against the 6-time Super Bowl champion Pittsburgh Steelers is quite honestly a more valuable game than that of a non-rival in the middle of the season. We have seen dynamic pricing in the airline industry and that is on the horizon, but we know there are potential limitations to that model. Our focus for the future is to make tickets more valuable based on your loyalty.
An example of this is Patriots365, which we launched in February. The program allows Season Ticket Members to earn $.15 for every dollar they spend at Dunkin Donuts (our inaugural partner) toward next year’s season tickets. In this way, your season ticket experience is extended beyond game day to your every day activities. Our Season Ticket Members have really jumped on board and are earning toward next year.
Why is branding so important, and what kind of data do you use to improve the brand?
Branding should be very authentic to the team, resonate with our fans, and allow them to be part of the team. Two seasons ago we identified something that Patriots coach Bill Belichick said to his players: “Do your job”.
We trademarked it, made it exclusive to our business, and put the slogan on t-shirts. Almost instantly it became the top-selling shirt in our stores and at PatriotsProShop.com. We then began extending the line women’s shirts and winter hats. We could not keep them on the shelf. We built an entire campaign around that brand during last year’s playoffs and our fan base really got behind it: that is a powerful brand story.
You represent the Patriots on multiple NFL committees, including Customer Data Management and Fan Engagement Research Advisory: how difficult is it to engage fans in the 21st century, and how has technology shaped your method of engagement?
It is much easier to engage customers today than it was twenty years ago when the primary mechanism was direct mail and perhaps radio/TV/billboards. Now, there is social media, email marketing, web tracking and app notifications. The data is endless so the challenge is harnessing that data into actionable and revenue-producing programs. Simultaneously, we work on understanding which people want to be engaged via direct mail while understanding that younger fans prefer a newer approach. The key is to reach people at the right time in the right place in the right way, but so much of it is technologically driven. Today, it is far more than just branding; we also have to perform customer analytics to know and better market to our customers.
You were selected to be part of Ticketmaster’s Sports Technology Advisors Group: why should fans buy tickets from Ticketmaster as opposed to elsewhere, and how do you give people the seat they want at the price they want?
The role of the group is to provide client perspective on the Ticketmaster suite of technologies. Especially over the past five years, Ticketmaster is trying to innovate, which speaks well of them and improves our operations. They have opened up their API’s to allow teams to have more direct access and are driven to make the customer experience better through many channels, including the development of TM+ which allows customers to see primary seats and secondary seats in the same place online. The primary reason to buy through Ticketmaster is that the tickets are real and directly from the team. Plus, the technology investment Ticketmaster has made and continues to make is ensuring ticketing is easier and more mobile friendly.
You co-founded and co-chair the MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference: how did you come up with the concept, and how much work does it take to keep it going every year?
This year is our 10th anniversary and we are expecting close to 4,000 attendees, which makes me very proud considering that we started with 120 people in a couple of classrooms at MIT. I was teaching a class with Daryl Morey (who is now GM of the Houston Rockets) and we came up with the idea for a conference at a time when more data was becoming available both in business and on the team side. Analytics was very niche at the time, but has now become part of the mainstream.
We work very closely with the Sloan students who apply to be conference leads. The energy and enthusiasm from the students is really fun. They get great hands-on experience while running what is considered one of the best conferences in the industry. It is a lot of work on nights/weekends, but is really fun and we are constantly trying to make it better and educate more people. What is most rewarding is the number of students, attendees and research paper participants who have gone on to get jobs in sports, as well as people who have submitted research papers.