With one year to go until the Paris 2024 Olympic and Paralympic Games, full service sports and entertainment marketing agency Sport UNLIMITED has fired up its proprietary Human Understanding Lab® to explore the emotion behind Olympic fandom.
The emotion behind fandom
This week marks the ‘one year to go’ point to the Paris 2024 Olympic and Paralympic Games. To many, the pinnacle of global sporting events, and certainly one of the most successful commercial sponsorship programmes out there.
After the Covid-enforced challenges of Tokyo, many brands have already invested or are considering investing in Paris 2024 and will be looking to maximise their return. They will be preparing now just as the athletes are and looking for any competitor advantage available. Understanding the unique emotion behind Olympic fandom could be exactly what they need.
When we think of fandom, we picture passionate crowds of fans experiencing the emotional highs and lows of following the sport they love. But we should also remember that we weren’t born sports fans. It’s a journey over time, a complex web of emotions, memories, and motivations to build both consumption and passion.
As sport marketeers, if we really want to connect with an audience through sport, we need to go beyond what fans ‘say’ and ‘do’, and we need to understand how they ‘feel’; the ‘why’ behind their fandom.
We need to identify what fans ‘get’ from following the sport, team or individual they love; what underlying emotional needs or motivations are met through sport. We can then harness that insight and use it to drive creative territories and activations that allow us to have a much deeper connection with fans. We can move them emotionally, and importantly, we can then move them to action.
Fans can’t articulate their emotions
These emotions and motivations are subconscious, so we used our Human Understanding Lab® research capabilities to power our Fan Emotion Index®, an insight tool that measures what fans truly feel. We record data at the implicit level, meaning we capture unspoken feelings.
As humans, we aren’t great at articulating how we feel – and we struggle even more to explain why we do the things we do. So, underpinned by years of neuroscience and behavioural science research and expertise, we analysed all the needs that drive people’s actions. We synthesised this understanding into our Human Needs Model (or ‘Wheel’) of the twelve core human needs that drive every one of us.
Our Human Needs Model covers everything from discovery and excitement through to safety and security, group affiliation through to self-image, and all that sits in between. We then surveyed a nationally representative sample of UK sports fans, to understand the relationship between these human needs and their sports fandom.
How? The really clever bit is that as well as measuring fans’ explicit responses to questions around their fandom, we also measure their speed of response to these questions. We’re looking for an insight into the emotional and automatic part of the brain. We only count answers that come from that part of the brain, as they show a respondent has true conviction in their answer.
Winning is not the be all and end all
On first look at the data, needs around winning immediately jumped out at us. We saw that three of the top twenty responses captured were associated with winning; ‘I like the feeling when who I support wins’ or ‘It feels like I win when who I support wins.’
However, despite over 80% agreeing with these statements on an explicit level (they say it’s true), in each case fewer than the benchmark of 40% responded with true emotional conviction. Put another way, fans say winning is important, but it isn’t a major driver deep down. But that makes sense, right? We can’t all be Manchester City fans and yet we all still come back to the Premier League each season.
So, what are the emotional drivers behind fandom?
We surveyed a nationally representative sample including fans of eight different sports. Looking at them as a whole, there were four core drivers of fandom that stood out.
Not all fans are the same
Sounds obvious? But the drivers of fandom are nuanced depending not just on the sport followed, but also the level of fandom and traditional demographics.
With exactly a year to go to the Paris 2024 Olympic and Paralympic Games, it made sense to look at how Olympic fans differ from the general.
At first look they may appear similar, but there are some marked differences.
Belonging is that intrinsic good feeling we get from being part of something bigger, that immediate connection as part of a wider group, but it is not a driver of Olympic fandom like it is for general fans, and especially for fans of sports like football and rugby. This could be because Olympic sport doesn’t have the tribalism more seasonal team-based sports do, or it could be because the Olympic Games doesn’t have a direct participatory link that some sports do such as cycling (although it’s an Olympic sport) which also scores highly on belonging.
However, idealism replaces belonging as one of the key drivers, which is the human need to connect to a higher purpose. The need extends beyond the individual, and is people’s need to feel that they, and society as a whole, are working toward a better future. From a fandom point of view, this was where statements such as ‘it benefits society more broadly’ or ‘it makes the world a better place’ score highly as the motivations behind Olympic fandom.
The Olympic movement has been about building a better world through sport since its inception, and more recently the movement has worked hard to reinforce that vision in its communications.
Marry that with a change in views from younger sports fans and an expectation now that the brands they love have more of a positive impact on the world, Olympic sponsorship provides an exciting and authentic route to bring sport and purpose together, and it’s embracing this connection that could allow sponsors to stand out from the pack. Roll on Paris 2024!
