What Any CPG Brand Can Learn from NBA Fan Audience Research
April 6, 2022
The way you foster a consumer/brand connection is by knowing your audience inside and out — and relating to them with your marketing efforts. But getting to know your audience that deeply isn’t easy. You need to go beyond surface level demographics, invented personas, and your own intuition as a marketer. You also need actual data. You need psychographics — or descriptions of someone’s personality traits and psychological attributes.
Audience research reports do just that. They study the demographics and psychographics of real people. This latest report takes a deep dive into the NBA fan audience segment. While this may not be your company’s target audience, there is still plenty every organization can learn. How much does this young, multicultural, predominantly male audience overlap with your CPG brand?
What is an Audience Research Report?
An audience research report aggregates qualitative research that identifies a personality profile common to a particular audience — in this case, NBA fans.
The information in our proprietary reports is created from gathered data from a variety of social networks, including Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, and Twitter. We also rely on public censuses. We gather this information using a combination of psychological frameworks, AI algorithms, academic research, and, obviously, social data.
Crucially, all of our data is highly statistically significant because it’s obtained from a sample of 17,000 people with a margin of error of less than one percent. The resulting personality profile from all of this data is completely custom every time.
Why NBA Fan Insights Are Relevant to Most CPGs
The personality profiles that come out of our audience research reports can help you predict consumer behavior and just get to know your audience better. You can also reference the profiles to craft relatable content and messaging for all of your marketing efforts.
But why NBA fans? First off, it’s an interesting, provocative audience segment worth getting to know for the sake of edification. More importantly, there’s a lot of overlap between NBA fans and target CPG audiences.
Anyone marketing to a young, multicultural, male audience can extract the insights and psychographic information in this report and apply them to their own targeting strategies. To state the obvious: There are a lot of young males buying a lot of food and beverage products.
Additionally, consider all of the megabrands that partner with the NBA, like Nike. You might not have Nike’s budget. You can’t actually partner with the NBA. But if even part of your audience intersects with Nike’s, you can feel confident using these insights to reach your own consumers.
Key Characteristics of NBA Fans
You can download the full audience research report on NBA fans here. There’s a lot there to consider. But we wanted to provide you with a few important takeaways to get you started.
Personality Assessment Findings
The audience research reports use the “Big 5” personality traits as a basis. NBA fans score highly in the following sub personality traits:
- Intellect
- Authority challenging
- Being deliberate and dutiful
- Hedonism (aka high immoderation)
That might not mean much to you unless you’re well acquainted with the “Big 5.” Basically, these results indicate that NBA fans are intellectually curious and can process symbols and abstract concepts with ease. From an advertising perspective, you could reach NBA fans with conceptual ads with a creative edge. They don’t necessarily need hard facts and feature descriptions like other personality types.
NBA fans aren’t afraid to push back against the status quo. Compounding that, they are interested in and devoted to social causes. As a marketer, don’t shy away from politically charged messaging or of-the-moment causes. This audience won’t be deterred by your directness. They’ll be intrigued and engaged.
Other notable personality attributes of NBA fans include brand consciousness, a tendency to indulge, and an affinity for engaging with social media content. All of which you can use to your CPG brand’s marketing and targeting advantage.
Brands and Influencers NBA Fans Love
Taking the research a step further, we analyzed the brands and influencers NBA fans are most attracted to. Some of this information may be surprising given the makeup of this audience segment.
NBA fan influencers include some expected celebrities, like current NBA players such as LeBron James, former players like Shaquille O’Neal, general sports media figures, and even President Barack Obama. But they also follow Chrissy Teigen and some other unexpected pop culture figures.
As far as food brands, NBA fans are into Wendy’s and Starbucks, but also Food and Wine Magazine and famously mean chef Gordon Ramsay. And for fashion? They love Nike, which is obvious. But they’re into Vogue Magazine as well.
You can read about many other influencers and brands NBA fans (and young males in general) follow in the full report — both the expected and surprising finds. Seeing the surprising influences impacting this audience can open up marketing channels you hadn’t considered before.
Digital Media Habits of NBA Fans
If you’re wondering where you should try to reach the NBA fan audience (or a young male audience in general), our research reveals that their favorite platforms are Twitch and TikTok, with Medium trailing closely behind. They’re also highly engaged with fantasy sports, gaming, and fashion apps — great advertising options for your CPG brand.
It’s vital to mention that NBA fans are active on social media. They are likely to post to their own profiles as well as engage with and reshare other posts. Some audiences are passive scrollers, but not this one. Take advantage by being active on your food and bev brand’s social media platforms.
Up Next: Personalized Marketing for Your CPG Brand
You can never have too much information on your CPG brand’s audience. And psychographics help you take one-dimensional demographic information up a notch.
Whether you saw overlap between your audience and NBA fans you can use to better target your consumers or you simply learned more about audience research, you’re one step closer to more personalized marketing.