Inside SBJ’s National Sports Forum: We Sell Nothing Fans Actually Need. So Why Are We Marketing Like We Do?

Wednesday, October 7 | 12:30 PM ET

Inside SBJ’s National Sports Forum

We Sell Nothing Fans Actually Need. So Why Are We Marketing Like We Do?

This episode of SBJ Live explores how teams, leagues and brands can move beyond demographic and transactional data to better understand the psychological drivers of fandom, build stronger fan relationships and create more effective marketing strategies.

The episode is part of our SBJ Live series focused on impactful content from SBJ’s National Sports Forum. A version of this session took place at the Forum in St. Louis earlier this year. The Forum heads to Houston, March 8-10, 2027. More information available here.

What We Will Discuss

• Why sports is a passion business rather than a necessity business
• The difference between demographics, behavioral data and psychographic insights
• How fan identity influences purchasing, loyalty and engagement
• What teams are learning about the emotional drivers of fandom
• The role of AI and fan intelligence in understanding motivations at scale
• The future of fan segmentation, personalization and lifecycle marketing

Featured Speaker

April Seifert is the founder of Sprocket, a fan research and strategy consultancy, and Fautor Labs, a psychographic fan segmentation platform built on a proprietary 12-driver framework of fandom. She is a social psychologist by training, with doctoral work on stereotypes and group behavior. She came to sports after leading analytics at Target, where she noticed a gap that still defines her work: teams can tell you what a fan bought, and very few can tell you why they came. April has worked with organizations across the many of the major professional leagues, venues, and sponsors. Her current research focuses on how teams and their partners can grow beyond the prototypical sports fan as younger audiences find teams through their feeds instead of their hometowns. She is based in Minneapolis.

Registration is free. All registrants will receive a recording of the webinar following the event.

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