In Defense Against Senator Klobuchar Sports Marketing Slam

BY ADAM GROSSMAN

In last night’s Democratic presidential primary debate, U.S. Senator Amy Klobuchar stated, “We’re not going to have a shortage on sports merchandising degrees, we’re gonna have a shortage on nurses and plumbers.”  Klobuchar is wrong on both the substance and spirit of this critique, and we will use sports as the frame to show why this is the case.

Klobuchar’s response came from a question she was asked regarding insurance and healthcare providers. More specifically, increasing insurance accessibility / affordability will not help people obtain the care they need if there are not enough primary care physicians and nurses to provide treatment.

Klobuchar responded that one way to ensure there were enough healthcare providers (and people in other vocations with shortages such as plumbing) is to strongly encourage students to major in certain subjects in college. This approach would best lead students to pursue professions of “need” rather than majors such as sports marketing.

How does increasing healthcare-focused majors in this way apply to sports? This dynamic is actual similar the central question that we addressed in a previous blog post highlighting Norway’s recent sports successes. The key question from that post was how did a country of 5.3 million people end up winning the most medals in the 2018 Winter Olympics while also having  top-ranked beach volleyball teams.  

Norway does not have the population size or the resources that the larger countries so it needs its children to more efficiently pick the “right” spot. The essential insight the country discovered (echoed in the book Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World) is that parents should not encourage their children to focus certain sports from early ages.

Instead, Norwegian children are allowed to play freely and determine what sport they like the most. Only after the children determine their sports “major” are then encouraged to practice rigorously to achieve success. This approach “filtered” children in the sport where they were most likely to succeed and reduced dropout rates because they were playing the sport they selected.  

Encouraging students to major in areas that lead to certain vocations would likely follow a similar negative pattern as parents selecting sports for their children. Not only would it not achieve the desired outcomes but it would increase the dropout rates for potential successful students. Instead of “forcing” people into certain majors, a better approach is likely giving the maximum number of students the largest probability to pick their area of interest as Norway did with youth sports.

Klobuchar is also wrong in the spirit of her comment. She is not only saying we need more healthcare-focused majors but that those students should come from sports. It would not matter necessarily if students like and would be good at sports marketing. Other majors are more “important” than something as “trivial” as sports.  

There is no question that having more primary care physicians and nurses is a good for the country. In addition, the work healthcare providers do is extremely important. They make immensely valuable contributions to society particularly at a time when there is a potential global pandemic occurring via the Coronavirus.

However, sports also makes significant contributions to American society. In fact, the outsized role sports plays in people’s daily lives is the foundation of the entire sports sponsorship industry. More specifically, companies (and politicians) want to partner with leagues, teams, and athletes specifically because people care so much about sports.

One way to counter criticism’ similar to the ones that Klobuchar makes is to show the value of people’s passion for sports using data-driven evidence. One of the “critiques” Block Six Analytics (B6A) receives is that we are using data to take the “human” element out of sports partnership to create dispassionately analysis for data-driven decision making.

In reality, our products our designed for the opposite reason. We want to use numbers as language to show the value of people’s passionate engagement with sports to all stakeholders. For example, a key element Corporate Asset Valuation Model (CAV) is to determine the value of increases in brand sentiment and engagement.

To accomplish this goal, we leverage our Social Sentiment Analysis Platform (SAP) to collect social media posts. We then use proprietary metrics and algorithms to show how lifts in sentiment and engagement have a strong and significantly correlation to lifts in revenue growth. These results are incorporated into the CAV model to determine company-specific return on investment (ROI) insights that can be communicated directly to senior leaders at a company.   

Klobuchar’s criticism reflects a common perspective on both sports marketing and the industry in general. The opportunity industry now has is that we can leverage technology, data, research and insights to counteract the false narrative that sports is not “important” because of the quantifiable impact it has on people’s daily lives.