Today’s sports industry has turned into a billion industry on the same level as more traditional industries. Present-day information technology and Customer Relationship Management (CRM) has enabled companies to deal with vast numbers of customers and to establish one-to-one communication with each of them. Lately, sports clubs have also discovered the benefits of introducing CRM. A sports club’s most important customers are its supporters. They are different from traditional customers in that they are characterized by a strong sense of loyalty to their favourite club. This article shows how one sports club, the Norwegian football club Rosenborg Ballklub (RBK), can use CRM as a strategic tool. Due to the limited material in this subject area, this is an explorative piece of work, based on examination of literature, in-depth interviews at RBK and collection of questionnaires from a selection of European football clubs.Our findings indicate that there are many similarities between a football club and a traditional company when CRM is introduced. In addition, for clubs, the CRM system must be adapted to the supporter role, and we propose the introduction of the concept Supporter Relationship Management in order to take better care of the strong ties between a club and its supporters.
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Furuholt, B., Skutle, N.G. (2007). Strategic Use of Customer Relationship Management (CRM) in Sports: The Rosenborg Case. In: Magyar, G., Knapp, G., Wojtkowski, W., Wojtkowski, W.G., Zupančič, J. (eds) Advances in Information Systems Development. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-387-70761-7_11
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