The Atalanta plan to build loyalty among children
Italian team presents interesting actions aimed at retaining and retaining the fans of Bergamo
Sensation inside the field in the last seasons reaching until the quarter-finals of the Champions League, Atalanta also demonstrates lucidity in managing the loyalty of its fans.
Loyalty
In short, a customer loyalty strategy seeks to create ways of relating to the consumer in the long term and making sure that when buying, he prefers one brand over another, resisting the actions of the competition.
To overcome the stages of behavior in relation to the brand, ranging from being a potential customer — those who meet the conditions (have an interest, economic conditions, etc.) to buy a certain product — up to the level of loyalty, there is a great way to be covered by the company.
Loyalty is so important because in addition to making customers at this stage buying constantly, the company has a source of spontaneous disclosure (mostly positive) of the brand, significant behavior in business environments increasingly prepared to capture customers.
Atalanta’s struggle
Knowing this, Atalanta prepares targeted actions for a not so exploited audience, but essential for the perpetuity of a football club: the children’s target. This effort becomes especially important due to the conditions in which the team is.
The first is demographic. This is because the Italian team is located in the city of Bergamo, with a population of approximately 121 thousand inhabitants, which restricts the club to having a small fan base.
Another factor, the geographic one, is that the city is very close to Milan, 60 km, which has Milan and Internazionale, teams of more tradition that attract a large crowd of fans (they have two of the three biggest fans in Italy, approximately 3.9 million each, compared to 245 thousand from Atalanta), including those living in Bergamo.
To put it another way, Atalanta, in addition to having a small fan base with no potential for growth, still loses a part of the region’s inhabitants who choose to be Milan players or interistas, which makes the task of ‘gathering’ fans even more complicated.
Despite this, Atalanta seems to be one of the most beloved clubs in the country. A study by the Statista Football Benchmark revealed that despite having the 10th largest crowd in the country (less than 4%), 27% of respondents claim to like the team — the highest value among all Serie A clubs — while showing little rejection (only 13%) — lowest percentage of the study (photo below). The survey also showed that on average almost 1/3 of Italians change teams, a very high value especially if we consider the case of Cagliari with 52% of the fans who cheered for other teams.
Case Atalanta
With this challenging context, since 2010 the club has implemented the project “Neonati Atalantini” (Atalantine newborns) that presents each newborn child in the Bergamo region with a kit of a miniature T-shirt and two bottles of Lactis milk for children (publication below).
Conceived by President Antonio Percassi, the program aims to strengthen the club’s bonds with the bergamasca community and seek to influence parents to encourage their children to cheer for the city team, which was highlighted by Percassi at the beginning of the project:
“If you are from Bergamo, you cannot help but love Atalanta, the team in your city ”.
With the success of the initiative, which in a decade has distributed more than 36,000 t-shirts, Atalanta started to distribute its kits to several other countries through the post office, adding immense convenience to parents. Orders have already been received from France, Switzerland, Lithuania, Australia, Holland, USA and even the United Arab Emirates.
Another interesting action took place on Easter 2016 when representatives of Atalanta took teddy bears with the team’s shirt (photo below) to the children of the Policlinico San Pietro hospital, showing the club’s special attention to the child audience.
It is likely that there are not many markets with as many potential customers as in football (illiterates are not potential customers for publishers, classes D and E are not potential customers for luxury brands …) and therefore a close relationship with the inhabitants of the region from an early age. can make a newborn in Bergamo today, in a few years time, one of the shirtless fanatics (and holder of the supporter partner plan) at the Atleti Azzurri d’Italia Stadium, rooting for the club he learned to love since motherhood.
LinkedIn: Theodoro Montoto
