Tottenham Hotspur has revolutionised its digital strategy, turning customer data management on its head since the inauguration of its new stadium in 2019.
The premier league football club‘s CRM and marketing operations manager Adam Griffiths appeared at Iterable’s Activate Summit in London last week, revealing how digital operations at the club had been entirely overhauled, centred around the new ground.
“In the digital space, we were nowhere, and then a couple years ago, we just decided to really invest in it to try and power that stadium into the most technologically advanced in the world,” he told mParticle’s CEO Michael Katz.
Katz – who works closely with the North London club – highlighted that how a business manages its data is key to securing success in the digital space.
“We live in a world that is constantly changing, and keeping pace with that change is as core to executing great digital strategies as the creation of the strategy itself,” he said, adding that mParticle has been focused on “championing the idea of tackling data chaos” over the past year, securing a strong foundation to “execute digital strategies.”
What does the future hold for Spurs’ digital strategy?
Highlighting the importance of a more personalised customer experience, Griffiths laid out what the club is doing in the digital sphere to retain fans.
“The plan for us is that, from the start of next season, when you tap your phone on entering the stadium, you get a welcome message.
“The stadium will know that you’ve been before and we can start to really get hyper-personalised in how we send that message and trigger it off.
The club has also launched an app in the last week, which will give it a “whole new channel” to reach people.
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Griffiths also highlighted the importance of collecting and analysing data to better understand customer demographic and potential.
“We need to try and tie transactional data and behavioural data together to create a bigger picture of what our fans are like – not just what they spend in the stadium with a retail shop.”
Does data management improve a brand’s overall performance?
The conversation also revealed that top-down change is crucial when reconfiguring a business’ data management outlook.
“No data platform or application will solve all your problems, you need to commit to change,” Katz said.
“It’s a combination of people platform and process. It’s about cultural evolution, it’s about change management.”
Part of Tottenham Hotspur’s approach was to focus on dynamic data capture, which helped it solve a number of customer acquisition issues.
“If we are missing some customer data, we can fill those gaps by setting up competitions which they enter by providing that information,” explained Griffiths, before pointing out that data has a direct effect on a company’s financial health as a whole.
“The quality of your data is so important, you can see the revenue drop off as your data quality drops off.”
The sentiment was echoed by Katz, who concluded by saying that “brands are built on the quality of the customer experience and experience is informed by data quality. Investment in data quality is ultimately an investment in brand quality.”
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