The importance of product availability

[The Great Dane]

Basic marketing theory suggests that the ease of access to a product, or it's availability, is directly linked to how popular that product will be. In other words the more convenient it is to consume a product the more it will be consumed.

Whether they realise it or not, the AFL have embraced this theory and it almost completely explains why they've been more successful than the other football codes in Australia.

While all the other codes have the majority of their matches behind a pay wall the AFL have pushed hard for all their clubs games to be on FTA in that club's region at the cost of short term financial gain, thus making it as easy as possible for the majority of people in each club's market to access them.
All their teams play out of centralised stadia in their cities, thus making it as easy as possible for the majority of fans in any given city to attend their games.
They have two clubs in every major capital city in the country, thus having at lease one major product and one alternate in all the largest states, and making supporting an AFL club easily accessible to the vast majority of the population of Australia.

These things (and many others) directly correspond to the growth of the VFL/AFL over the last 40ish years. In other words you can watch the AFL's jump in supporters as a result of these practices being introduced to the league, and to reinforce the point one last time, as they increased the ease of product availability more and more people consumed it.

Basically if the NRL wants to grow it's market share both nationally, and locally within the 'heartlands', then the best way to do that is to increase the sport's product availability as much as possible in every situation, even if it sometimes means making hard decisions and taking a financial hit in the short term.

 

[Get Rid of The Donkeys]

All very good points.

We're stuck with the current situation until 2027, unfortunately. Our game never learns.

 

[mongoose]

This is all true, the problem is the NRL and its clubs don't seem to want the sport to grow its market share nationally and going by a number of fans on this forum, they don't want it either. What can you do?

 

[Perth Red]

The NRL has hung its hat for a very long time on the reason for avg crowds being stadia quality. Now we are getting to a tipping point of very high quality stadia for most clubs the crowds havent really grown significantly as an overall avg so clearly that wasnt the big issue for many clubs.
Clubs are lazy and just from a purely commercial sense the inability to engage their customers and increase sales is quite staggering. I guess when 60% of your revenue is given to you by the NRL and a further 10-20% by your pokie club it doesnt drive innovation or a desire for growth in customer loyalty and sales.
It still flummoxes me that all of the Sydney clubs havent got together to work out reciprocal arrangements for vastly reduced ticket prices for away fans for example. Only Parra and Storm are doing things with their memberships to try and grow their attendances. Since the NRL handed membership responsibility back to clubs the growth has reduced dramatically.

 

[Perth Red]

I also think the NRL needs to get off its backside and reinvigorate the heartland. The viewing audiences in Sydney on FTA are significantly lower for NRL than AFL gets in Melbourne. On Sunday as many people watched AFL in the 2 NRL cities as watched NRL in Brisbane! NRL needs to get more popular everywhere if it is to make up lost ground. Also on Sunday AFL got three times more viewers on FTA in NRL cities than NRL got in AFL cities. Multiply that over a season and that's a massive tv audience gap.

 

[Jim Rockford]

This is all true, the problem is the NRL and its clubs don't seem to want the sport to grow its market share nationally and going by a number of fans on this forum, they don't want it either. What can you do?

As both myself and MugaB have pointed out we are all for expansion. The issue we have is with those who think the only way to do that is by cutting or relocating Sydney teams. Addition by subtraction is not a smart policy.

 

[Hartwood]

All their teams play out of centralised stadia in their cities, thus making it as easy as possible for the majority of fans in any given city to attend their games.

Sydney is structured very differently to Melbourne though. NRL supporter bases are very much based on which region of the city you live, whereas AFL teams are all inner-city teams, this will never change, and pushing for teams to move away from suburbs will not help our game. Roosters, Eels and soon Souths play in stadiums in major business districts, so there are options for fanbases outside of suburban sydney

 

[Perth Red]

Sydney is structured very differently to Melbourne though. NRL supporter bases are very much based on which region of the city you live, whereas AFL teams are all inner-city teams, this will never change, and pushing for teams to move away from suburbs will not help our game. Roosters, Eels and soon Souths play in stadiums in major business districts, so there are options for fanbases outside of suburban sydney

This is one of those urban myths. Whilst the Melbourne teams are named after the inner suburbs the reality is they draw from all over the city, including the far flung reaches. No way Carlton has 70k members when the population of Carlton is 18k! Transport certainly plays a part and its much easier to get around some cities than others, as does kick off times, but end of day its engagement and passion of fans. If you're not that engaged its always going to be easier to sit at home and watch on TV. Having said that the tv audiences are bigger in Melbourne as well so I think it is fair to say the game is just more popular in that city. Something the NRL and its clubs needs to address.

 

[Hartwood]

This is one of those urban myths. Whilst the Melbourne teams are named after the inner suburbs the reality is they draw from all over the city, including the far flung reaches. No way Carlton has 70k members when the population of Carlton is 18k! Transport certainly plays a part and its much easier to get around some cities than others, as does kick off times, but end of day its engagement and passion of fans. If you're not that engaged its always going to be easier to sit at home and watch on TV. Having said that the tv audiences are bigger in Melbourne as well so I think it is fair to say the game is just more popular in that city. Something the NRL and its clubs needs to address.

Thats kinda my point though, AFL teams are popular all around the city and I don't think that would be achieved in the NRL

 

[Jim Rockford]

AFL troll Perth Red once again telling us how wonderful Melbourne and the AFL are. I still can't believe how many gullible suckers he has fooled on here.

 

[Perth Red]

Thats kinda my point though, AFL teams are popular all around the city and I don't think that would be achieved in the NRL

Souths seem to be doing a reasonable job at attracting fans from outside their small suburban origin. They are really the only club in Sydney that has committed to playing at a central stadium and whilst their crowds arent exactly huge they are amongst the biggest avg in Sydney and their membership is one of the highest.

Tigers and Bulldogs also have the same potential if they stop being so poor on and off the field and if Tigers settle on a single central stadium.'

And its not just Melbourne, look at Freo, they weren't stupid enough to play in a shtty suburban ground in Fremantle, they play at a state of the art stadium 20kms away from their region but in doing are attracting a crowd avg of 30k plus.

 

[The Great Dane]

Sydney is structured very differently to Melbourne though. NRL supporter bases are very much based on which region of the city you live, whereas AFL teams are all inner-city teams, this will never change, and pushing for teams to move away from suburbs will not help our game. Roosters, Eels and soon Souths play in stadiums in major business districts, so there are options for fanbases outside of suburban sydney

AFL teams in Melbourne used to be in the exact same situation as the NRL teams are now, with almost all of them playing out of small, and for the most part dilapidated, suburban grounds in front of small crowds (relative to now).

Starting in the 80s the AFL started to push as many clubs as possible to share a handful of the best stadiums which lead to an almost instant jump in most Melbourne clubs average attendance (with some notable exceptions), before in about 2000 they forced all of them to use either the MCG or Docklands which saw another jump. Pick almost any team and you can watch their average attendance from about 1980 slowly trend upwards till today, and a large part of that is centralised stadia.

Furthermore, most of that growth doesn't come from Melbourne's inner-city, in fact it can't possibly because not enough people live in the inner city to sustain it, therefore it has to come from people traveling from right across the city to attend games, as anybody that's been at Flinders Street Station on a weekend during the season can attest. In other words by moving all their games to either the MCG or Marvel the AFL made their game days more accessible to a far larger portion of the population of the city, and there's no reason why the NRL couldn't do similar in Sydney.

Furthermore centralised stadia doesn't necessarily mean every club sharing one or two stadiums right in the middle of town. It can mean clubs sharing better stadiums within 'their' region of the city, i.e. all the inner west teams sharing Bankwest for example, and the NRL should be pushing for more state of the art stadiums like that across as many regions of the city as necessary and pushing for clubs to play all their games at them.

 

[Hartwood]

Hopefully Liverpool stadium gets built before Penrith's upgrade. That will mean 5 teams playing out of Sydney's 3 main commercial centres

 

[Perth Red]

AFL teams in Melbourne used to be in the exact same situation as the NRL teams are now, with almost all of them playing out of small, and for the most part dilapidated, suburban grounds in front of small crowds (relative to now).

Starting in the 80s the AFL started to push as many clubs as possible to share a handful of the best stadiums which lead to an almost instant jump in most Melbourne clubs average attendance (with some notable exceptions), before in about 2000 they forced all of them to use either the MCG or Docklands which saw another jump. Pick almost any team and you can watch their average attendance from about 1980 slowly trend upwards till today, and a large part of that is centralised stadia.

Furthermore, most of that growth doesn't come from Melbourne's inner-city, in fact it can't possibly because not enough people live in the inner city to sustain it, therefore it has to come from people traveling from right across the city to attend games, as anybody that's been at Flinders Street Station on a weekend during the season can attest. In other words by moving all their games to either the MCG or Marvel the AFL made their game days more accessible to a far larger portion of the population of the city, and there's no reason why the NRL couldn't do similar in Sydney.

Furthermore centralised stadia doesn't necessarily mean every club sharing one or two stadiums right in the middle of town. It can mean clubs sharing better stadiums within 'their' region of the city, i.e. all the inner west teams sharing Bankwest for example, and the NRL should be pushing for more state of the art stadiums like that across as many regions of the city as necessary and pushing for clubs to play all their games at them.

Dave Smith knew this!

 

[The Great Dane]

Thats kinda my point though, AFL teams are popular all around the city and I don't think that would be achieved in the NRL

AFL teams in Melbourne are popular across the city because over an extended period of time the AFL have made it as easy and convenient as possible to support any AFL club almost no matter where you are from in Melbourne.

It's rare that you see a person from e.g. Hornsby actively support any of the NRL clubs, why? Because it takes effort to support an NRL team when you live in Hornsby, but make it easy as possible to access the product and you'll see an uptick in people from Hornsby actively supporting NRL clubs.

That's literally the whole point of this thread.

 

[The Great Dane]

Hopefully Liverpool stadium gets built before Penrith's upgrade. That will mean 5 teams playing out of Sydney's 3 main commercial centres

I actually think North Sydney is more important, and there's solid reasoning for that, but this isn't the place to discuss it.

 

[The Great Dane]

As both myself and MugaB have pointed out we are all for expansion. The issue we have is with those who think the only way to do that is by cutting or relocating Sydney teams. Addition by subtraction is not a smart policy.

You have to cut back the dead branches to make a bush grow as big as possible, and it's no different with a business.

 

[Jim Rockford]

You have to cut back the dead branches to make a bush grow as big as possible, and it's no different with a business.

True, but the branches they want to cut aren't dead. They could do with some work to bring them up to their full potential. That's what the NRL should be concentrating on.

 

[mongoose]

AFL troll Perth Red once again telling us how wonderful Melbourne and the AFL are. I still can't believe how many gullible suckers he has fooled on here.

I agree we shouldn't be comparing like for like with AFL. League has had to contend with Union for its entire existence both in Australia and England where as AFL has had no such competition in its heartland. League has different challenges. We could still learn some things from AFL though...

League probably is a better TV sport as well but the NRL and its clubs still should work on creating better and more valuable game days.

 

[Jamberoo]

Great OP.
The problem is that, until only a few months ago, most RL people, including many on here and most administrators, including PVL, were of the belief that the gap between AFL and NRL was not growing. Even PVL, after his first season in charge and a good look at all the metrics, is now aware that the hundreds of millions that the AFL spent in NSW/Qld on Suns/GWS is now paying dividends in terms of participation (massive gap and widening), ratings (small gap but growing) and attendances (maintaining the already huge gap). Rugby League has been in denial for way too long. If the sport does nothing, it is inevitable that the gap will continue to grow and one day, be it 20, 30 or 100 years, AFL will be number one in all states.
So the Rugby League needs to think big picture - there needs to be consultants engaged, symposiums, whatever, but a 20 year plan is required. Millions needs to be spent. Perhaps hundreds of millions.
Simply building new stadiums won't do it, Nor will Bris 2. Or expanding the women's comp. But these are good and obvious starts. RL needs to decide if they are a national code (which requires teams in Perth and Adelaide) or if they are content to try to just hold onto market leadership in NSW & Qld for as long as possible, before the inevitable decline that is now happening to RU.
They need to partner with NSW & Qld governments to grow the game at grass roots, before those governments are further seduced by AFL. The Vic govt puts millions into AFL grass roots and stadia, because they know that there is a return. On average there is one non-VIc club in the AFL GF each year, and that means 20K - 30K fans travelling to Melbourne. So, this shows that there are ways that NRL clubs in WA & SA can benefit NSW. I was previously of the opinion that strengthening the heartland should be the priority, but the game must become national as a matter of urgency. If there is not the player depth, then go the relocation route. Use the Swans as the blueprint - they are drawing 10K to games here in Vic (wearing the old South Melbourne jumper) at a time when crowds are down dramatically. So it is possible to keep the old fans whilst growing the game in another state. Get the WA/SA govts and some wealthy backers to put up big bucks for a team to relocate. $20m - $50m. Make sure that they keep the history, jersey, etc, six - eight games in Sydney, with memberships covering those games. The game needs a radical shake up off field. This should be PVL's area of expertise. Instead he has been fiddling with the game on field, something he knows very little about.