Hold up, hold up!! We need to pause for the briefest of moments and think about something slightly nonsensical.
Music is among the most personal and powerful of all art forms. It soundtracks the highs and lows of human experience. Sport is much the same: the irrational adoration of a team seemingly incapable of winning.
Emotion. Identity. Memory. Belonging.
Yet the principal systems we use to profile the 'identifiable fan' cannot capture, analyse or explain the basis of that human connection.
They can connect every stream, click, purchase, ticket and interaction. Brilliant. Valuable. Technically impressive.
But the technology can connect the evidence. It cannot make the human meaning appear.
And if the person has never purchased, registered, attended, downloaded or joined? They are not an incomplete record. They are completely invisible.
SFF48: YOUR CRM IS NOT YOUR FAN STRATEGY
The platform is sophisticated. The segmentation is impressive. The automation is powerful. - CRM Can Manage Fan Data. It Can’t Explain Why Fans Care.
Then comes the revealing question: “So, what are you actually doing with it?” If the answer is eleven or twelve predominantly transactional emails each year, an extraordinary CRM can quickly become a very expensive mailing list.
Technology can distribute and scale communication. It cannot create the fan relationship - or the strategy - on its own.
YOU CAN OWN THE DATA AND STILL MISUNDERSTAND THE FAN
Owning fan data matters. But possessing the record of someone’s behaviour is not the same as understanding the person.
The fan who spends most may not be the most passionate. The supporter who attends least may be making the greatest sacrifice. And some of your most influential advocates may barely appear in your database at all.
Article 47 of The Superfan Formula asks a deceptively simple question: what do you actually understand when you ‘own’ the fan data?
THE BEHAVIOUR WAS VISIBLE. THE BARRIER WAS NOT.
Spotify knew an extraordinary amount about how people used its service.
It could see who listened, what they listened to, when and where they listened, what device they used, which tracks they skipped, which features they explored and who moved from Spotify Free to Premium.
If any company should have been able to find the answer within its behavioural data, surely it was Spotify. Surely.
Except the answer wasn’t there.
During my time at EMI and Warner Music, we worked closely with Spotify to understand the motivations, perceptions and emotions of different tribes of music fans across ten countries.
In our research at the time, nearly half of Spotify Free users thought Premium had limitations that simply did not exist. Perhaps even more remarkably, around a quarter of existing Premium subscribers didn’t know that features they wanted were already available to them.
Spotify could see the behaviour.
It could not see the misunderstanding behind it.
The behaviour was visible. The barrier was not.
SFF45: YOU KEEP USING THE WORD “INSIGHT”…
I’m sorry to be the bearer of bad news, but the slide in your presentation labelled “Insights” probably doesn’t contain any.
Streams increased by 14%. Frequent match attendees buy more replica shirts. Vinyl buyers spend more on concert tickets.
These may be useful observations, patterns or correlations. But they do not necessarily explain why anything happened. And without the human explanation, we may be measuring activity while completely misunderstanding the person.
This atricle: why data, evidence and insight are not interchangeable and why knowing what fans did yesterday is not enough to create growth tomorrow.
You Keep Using the Word “Insight”…
AN AUDIENCE IS NOT A COMMUNITY. AND A COMMUNITY IS NOT A FAN STRATEGY.
There’s a growing consensus across music - and increasingly sport - that we need to build stronger, more direct relationships with fans. I agree completely, but we also need to be much more precise about what we mean.
An audience is not automatically a community.
A database is not automatically an owned relationship.
A group of highly engaged consumers is not automatically a fan strategy.
And calling something a community does not make it one.
Not every fan wants the same relationship. Some want access. Some want recognition. Some want to participate, create or advocate. Some simply want to listen, attend and remain quietly loyal for decades.
That does not make them less passionate. Although many of the engagement metrics we use to judge fandom would suggest otherwise.
This week’s edition of The Superfan Formula distinguishes between six things that are related - but absolutely not interchangeable.
SFF43: THE MANAGER IS THE AUTEUR.
Has artist management accidentally been reduced to project management? The manager spends the day responding, approving, forwarding and chasing. Busy? Absolutely. Strategic? Not necessarily.
Somebody must optimise for the artist’s whole career, not simply the stream, ticket or T-shirt in isolation. That responsibility belongs to the manager.