Personalization and partnerships become critical

Two years ago the Colts adopted a new tag line for our marketing efforts, “Make it Personal.” The inspiration for this phrase came from the team’s desire to see fans express their deep feelings for the team. Making it personal means many things to many fans. It’s about how each person chooses to demonstrate his or her passion.

The Colts Fan Network extends personalization on-line. We’re creating a system that will allow fans to express themselves through personalized pages, personalized E mail addresses, personal blogs, personal reviews (of products)…they can even join the sub-groups (chapters) that best fit their personal situations. We are partnering with our fans to “co-create” a personalized experience. And this will make it easier for the Colts and our sponsors to target messages back to the fans.

“The interesting thing is that this approach to having your information personalized is a benefit not only for the user who can continue to refine and target information, which is what we are working on, to people in a very personalized way; but also for businesses who want to know they are spending their money in an effective and targeted way.” (Eric Schmidt, CEO Google)

Which brings me to my second point about partnerships. Just as the Colts Fan Network would be nothing without fan particiption, our sponsorship and content strategies for Colts.com is similarly based on partnerships.

On the sponsorship front, we are beginning talks with several national brands who aspire to reach Colts fans through our Web-based platforms. It is my belief that we should stop using the word “sponsor” altogether and replace it with the word “partner”. Some may say this is merely semantics, but I believe that the language we use reflects the way we think. Sponsorship by definition means that a company or person underwrites the efforts of a team or a person or an event. Sponsors make this investment in hopes that (by association with the person, team or event) the sponsor will be seen by participants or observers in a more favorable light. This happens today, for sure, but it’s time to take it to the next level.

A partnership is different than a sponsorship in several important ways. Most importantly, a partnership is a partnership only when both parties end up better off together than they were apart. Partnerships are always win-win. Partnerships are also accountable. So without taking more time here and now to explain, suffice to say that we are looking for “partners” who want to invest in helping us build our personalization platforms – and in exchange – we will commit to helping our partners maximize their ROI. We won’t simply leave it to them (sponsors) to “activate”. We’ll work hand-in-hand.

In addition, we are currently working on several content sharing partnerships that we hope will add value to our fans’ experiences, both on Colts.com and the Colts Fan Network. As the Web audience continues to expand, and the personal tastes and habits of our fans reveal themselves, we realize that we cannot possibly hope to create all the new content these fans might want. So we’ll form partnerships with other Web sites, with authors, with publishers, with media outlets, etc. I’ll write more about this as we bring these content partners on line.

Making it personal for fans and forming partnerships with content producers are two new things for us. We’ve done these things in small ways before, but never with the intention to sustain (direct) relationships over time. In the past we simply have not had the resources to dedicate sustained (24/7/3650 effort) to any program, with the exception of our team website, www.colts.com. So this is going to be challenging, but I believe ultimately rewarding – both financially – and spiritually. After all, there is a bigger reason we’re doing all of this, which I’ll discuss further in future posts.