HotSpace Sporting Events
Find out today
what fans want tomorrow.
HotSpace helped a global sports event see what’s really driving fans.
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Sporting events are under a constant need to evolve and continually deliver value with pressure from all sides:
Retain passionate fans
Attract new global audiences
Create clearer value for commercial partners
Develop a sustainable long-term strategy
The team needed a clear unifying strategy backed in can’t-argue-with-that data.
But traditional insight solutions are slow, expensive and complex.
HotSpace solves this in a completely new way.
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HotSpace is built on behavioural science. It solves for the key downfall of research; people often do not admit what truly drives them.
Instead, we must analyse the psychology of fans in ‘discovery mode’. We must be able to see exactly what they see, and deeply analyse the content they consume at a mass scale.
This hasn’t been possible until now. Now we can use the power of hundreds of AI readers scanning the same webpages.
What people read, share and use to decide from a wide range of sources from news, reviews, community platforms and brands’ owned content.
From this comprehensive dataset, HotSpace intelligently detects the pay-offs people truly seek and maps these into Need Spaces.
HotSpace showed the team which brands were best-in-class for specific Spaces, where the market was saturated, and where there were opportunities for growth.
HotSpace delivered strategic gold in a fraction of the time. Using HotSpace Agent, the team were able to query the data directly and get exactly the answers they needed without scrolling through a long PowerPoint.
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HotSpace analysis revealed that fans and future fans don’t just want to watch sport. They desperately want to belong, shape and believe in any sporting event’s broader purpose:
Human connection to competitors as people (stories, journeys, purpose)
Shared belonging - a reason to reconnect as families and friendship groups
Co-creation - permission to make, remix and share their own and peers’ content
True sport - visible fairness, meritocracy and meaningful purpose
Surprisingly however, across the category, brands spoke far too heavily about exclusive excellence. And little about Community, Ethics and Accessibility.
Interesting Data
HotSpace analysis provided a strategic view of the market the client had never seen before. Grounded in real time data, it was powerful to see trends and needs that had felt intuitively true, become quantified and proven through this method.
You can interact with the chart below:
It shows the various market spaces and how much they feature in the content audiences use to discover the market. Note: Rows sum to 100%
HotSpace reveals market drivers instantly
HotSpace mapped the market landscape into 5 major spaces: Excellence, Community, Entertainment, Accessibility and Ethics. Beneath this, it identified 17 micro-spaces which offer niche potential for underserved growth spaces.
This interactive data ranks which micro spaces are being missed more often by brands.
Note: >1 signals an opportunity to leverage an underserved space. <1 indicates saturation and homogeny.
Strategy no longer has time to waste
Today, many consultants have the choice between moving forwards with strategy backed by little research, or waiting for a series of complex research exercises to take place.
HotSpace was built to solve this, and eliminate the trade-off. Research should not have to take so much time.
This case study showed us that consultants were able to get access to rigorous datasets that reveal underlying motivations in a fraction of the time and cost of traditional research.
Critically, they also didn’t have to spend a lot of time explaining exactly how the research was conducted and what it means.
The Outcome
The team got exactly the insight they needed, faster.
They got a fresh view of the market in a way that is more psychologically revealing than what research participants actually say in interviews or surveys.
No one was left grasping at straws.
The comparative brand audit helped to validate who owns what and where white space exists that are ripe for creating new value.
More time and money for activation.
The outcome was clear, actionable and easy-to-get insight that enabled the team to make bold recommendations with confidence, without unanswered questions, boosted by more time and money for what really matters: making the strategy happen.
Client Feedback
“At first I thought HotSpace was a cheap shortcut but it actually worked better than doing expensive research.”
Consulting Lead (Global; Sporting Event)