Could it be an opportunity for Korean baseball to develop one step further? The road to integrated marketing in the KBO League is in the middle of the road.
In the case of American professional baseball (MLB), everything is provided on the official site 안전놀이터. Each team’s homepage, ticket sales, online broadcasting, and baseball records are all gathered in one place. It is quite different from the KBO league, where everything is scattered.
The total number of spectators in the 2022 KBO League was 6,076,074. The number of spectators for professional baseball, which once exceeded 8.4 million in the mid-2010s, was hit hard by Corona 19, and returned to around 2009, when the professional baseball boom just started to catch fire. This is why the baseball world shouts ‘crisis’ with one voice.
KBO dreamed of KBO.com in 2018 with the inauguration of former president Chung Un-chan. The KBO Media Center was newly established to establish a video hub, and ‘integrated marketing’, which brings together the homepage and ticket sales window, began to be promoted in earnest.
The intention is not to be satisfied with the present, but to make a bigger pie by combining the profits divided by team into one. There is a reason that the beginning was set as an integrated ticket. It is possible to build a site that guarantees 6 to 7 million ticket-purchasing customers a year and build integrated customer data through this.
KBO’s calculation is that there will be room for providing content tailored to the needs of customers or for target-specific marketing. In the long term, the plan is to increase synergy by integrating goods such as uniforms as well as tickets. Evaluations in professional basketball (KBL) and professional volleyball (V-League), which are already in place, are also positive.
The use of Internet relay windows is in the same context. There is also a rosy prospect that if various advertisements, such as helmets and patches, which are currently marked as subsidies from the parent company, are integrated at the KBO level, more revenue than the current one can be generated. As it costs a lot to maintain and update the homepage, there are opinions that it is not necessarily a loss from the club’s point of view.