Off-Topic: Yes MLB, You Have an Old Age Issue

April 10, 2015 Leave a comment

As a diehard Red Sox fan, I love the opening week of baseball. That’s why I decided to dig into our consumer benchmark data, which includes information about sports preferences.

I took a look at the difference in MLB fans across genderations (a term I use for the mix of gender and age). No surprise, men like baseball a lot more than women across every age group.

Baseball knows it has an age issue (see my notes on a session I attended with MLB commissioner Rob Manfred), and it certainly does. Its strongest base of fans is with older consumers. There’s a very noticeable drop in fans who are younger than 55 years old and then it drops off a great deal for anyone younger than 35 years old.

1504_MLBbyGenderation

I also examined which companies have the most and least MLB fans in their customer bases. While this data is probably valuable for firms thinking about investing in commercials and sponsorships with MLB teams, I didn’t do it for them. I just did it for fun.

I analyzed the customer bases of 328 companies (the ones for which I had at least 100 consumer data points) to find the percentage that said they enjoy watching professional baseball. As you can see below, the range of MLB fans goes from a high of 66% for AirTran Airways and ACE Rent A Car to 33% for Medicaid.

1503_MLBbyCompany_TopBottom

Filed under Sports

About Bruce Temkin, CCXP
I'm an experience (XM) management catalyst; helping organizations improve results by engaging the hearts and minds of their employees, customers, and partners. I enjoy researching and speaking about these topics. I lead the Qualtrics XM Institute, which is the world's best job. We're igniting a global community of XM Professionals who are inspired and empowered to radically improve the human experience. To achieve this goal, my team focuses on thought leadership, training, and community building. My work is driven by a set of fundamental beliefs: 1) Everything starts and ends with human beings, so you need to understand how people think, feel, and behave; 2) XM is a discipline that needs to be woven throughout an organization's entire operating fabric; and 3) Building the XM discipline requires a combination of culture, competency, and technology.

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