CONSULTANTS

Appendix E
Benchmarking
Our next method of research we decided to use was benchmarking. The primary
purpose of benchmarking is to research into how other schools create and implement
marketing strategies to better inform the University of South Dakota, and to discover
new ideas for methods of increasing attendance. We selected benchmarking because of
its strengths, which allow us to look at successful methods other universities have tried
and it allows us to look at the competition. Weaknesses to benchmarking are that the
methods from other universities may not have the same success at USD, as it did for
them. Benchmarking also may not provide us with new ideas to implement at USD. The
materials for the benchmarking were collected from online databases. Benchmarking is
purposive sampling since we selected the universities that are fairly similar to USD to
review and gather information from. Currently getting students to attend college athletic
events has been a challenge for most college schools throughout the country. Not only
are schools struggling to get students to attend games, but also when students do
attend, schools are having trouble keeping them there throughout the entire game. To
begin the benchmarking section we will look at the issues Ohio University had in 2008.
In 2008 Drake Bolon took over Ohio University’s director of marketing position.
After conducting a survey at the university, Bolon found that one of the reasons students
weren’t attending games is because they were not aware of when events were taking
place (Steinback, 2013). “There’s never an excuse for a student not to know when a
didn’t know when the game was, and I hear that from our peers in the Midwest Athletic
Conference and other schools across the country. That’s really step one. We make sure
that’s darn near impossible (Steinback, 2013).” Ohio University has taken many steps
to insure that students never misunderstand when games take place. Ohio University
students walking throughout the campus in the fall can’t help but notice the posters and
wall reinforce the message. Student Facebook pages and Twitter feeds are likewise
plastered with daily reminders along with paid advertising during game week (Steinback,
attendance at university football games is up 85 percent since 2008.
Another study done in 2011 was a study by the Journal of Issues in Intercollegiate
Athletics. The group of people who ran this study did so in order to analyze collegiate
marketing strategies and the evaluation process. The authors for the 2011 study
consisted of Christina Martin from Troy University, Laura Miller from California University
of Pennsylvania, Rawia Elsisi, from Troy University, Ashley Bowers from Southern
Louisiana University and Stacey Hall from The University of South Mississippi. Surveys
were mailed to 329 Division I-A athletic marketing directors and 136 were returned,
which is a 41.3% response rate (Martin, Miller, Elsisi, Bowers, Hall, 2011). Responses
to these surveys showed that half-time promotions, brochures, local business sponsors,
radio advertisements, game giveaways, newspaper advertisements, and Internet
advertisements were used as promotions 90% of the time. Of the 136 respondents,
68% thought they could develop and implement new marketing strategies, while 62%
said they often evaluate their marketing strategies. Moreover, 54% of athletic marketing
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