Your First Impressions of Ireland: For our first blog post in Ireland, let’s focus first on your initial impressions of Dublin from our first day in town. What caught your attention during this first day in Ireland and in the city?
Diagonal crosswalks are definitely a sight to be seen. I also love how all the drivers are reckless, yet careful at the same time. People drive very aggressively, however every single driver I have seen is 100% focused on the road. No one is on their cell phone, smoking cigarettes, or doing anything that could distract them from the road. So even though it is a more fast-paced environment, there are less accidents than in America.
Croke Park and The Business of Sports: In addition to your first experience with Ireland and Dublin, we need to prepare for tomorrow’s visit to Croke Park Stadium, which has seating capacity for nearly 83,000 fans. The park is the home of Ireland’s largest sporting and cultural organization, the Gaelic Athletic Association (GAA) and each September hosts the GAA All-Ireland Football and Hurling Championship Finals. The park’s website https://crokepark.ie has several interesting articles on commercial opportunities associated with the stadium, such as corporate sponsorships, along with articles on some of the specific target market segments and even some material on how the park is connected to matters of environmental sustainability.
In preparation for your site visit to Croke Park for a behind-the-scenes tour, think back to our Pittsburgh site visit with Pitt Athletics, and how Pitt Athletics is a multi-million dollar business due to a combination of ticket sales, TV revenue, merchandising and licensing and other revenue streams. Croke Park likely faces similar types of commercial opportunities and challenges. Based on your quick review of the Croke Park website, identify one commercial opportunity and one commercial challenge.
One opportunity that Croke Park definitely can expand upon is their ability to host concerts. They could try to market themselves as the main concert venue in not only Dublin, but all of Ireland. The marketing team could try and make Croke Park more of a destination, opposed to a fun place Dubliners love to go to. I challenge that faces them is their branding. For example, if you go to their merchandise section, they lack clothing items. They have no branding that they can promote. If you compare this to a similar high seating stadium in America such as Madison Square Garden, they have a name brand that they can promote and set as a destination for people.
A Question For The Site Visit: Finally, acting as members of consulting teams that might choose to write a group paper about the commercial opportunities and challenges connected to Croke Park, what specific questions do you have about the business model for Croke Park that relate to our course material (Triple Bottom Line and sustainability, market segmentation, maximization versus shared value, etc.)? Give us a specific question for tomorrow’s visit.
How does Croke stadium market to people who are not interested in coming to the games or to people who enjoy sports, but have to go out of their way to attend games?