MCE/MCE+1 – Blog Post Prompt – Wednesday July 31, 2019 – Ireland and Croke Park
Name: Connor Damon
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?
One thing that really stood out to me today was how quiet the city is. Unlike most city atmospheres, Dublin’s streets are clean and quiet, giving it a calm feel. I thought it was especially cool how if you left a main road and turned down a corner the city was silent, which makes it feel like you are not in a city at all. I also was really impressed by the people. All the people working in the restaurants and stores that we have gone to have been exceptionally kind and welcoming, which has been a nice adjustment for someone who has never left the country like me.
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 of the highest reward commercial opportunities that Croke Park can potentially face is the development of professional-level sports at Croke Park and in Dublin. Though it is the third largest stadium in Europe, Croke park does not host any professional sports teams. Instead the stadium is a home to smaller, more locally and less internationally popular sports like hurling and Gaelic football, because it wants to maintain the environment it has always had and preserve the stadium and city from the “prima donnas” of the professional sporting world. A challenge that the stadium is likely to face is the fact that the clubs that play at Croke Park may not necessarily draw in very much revenue for the company, since they are not professional teams.
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 your company address different segments of the market (i.e. children, the elderly, etc.) and how does that factor into the marketing strategy of the stadium?