NFL faces long road to scoring points in China
Print Edition
FOR more than seven years, the National Football League has been trying to develop a fan base in China. While the sport has seen some recent growth in the country, the league has a long way to go before it becomes a household name among a significant portion of Chinese people.
In late November 2014, three-time Super Bowl champion Jerry Rice visited Beijing and Shanghai in the NFL’s latest China campaign. But how the sport is marketed in China varies greatly from the United States and other countries where American football has a presence. Rice is far from a household name in China, a fact that illustrates the NFL’s challenge in making inroads in the country.
NFL China operates in 19 Chinese cities. Some 47 million people in these cities belong to the organization’s target demographic of upper-income, well-educated 15- to 54-year-old males — a small market segment given China’s total population of 1.34 billion. NFL football is marketed as something of a luxury brand in China, unlike in the US where it transcends socioeconomic boundaries.
“It’s very different as far as marketing it in the United States. There (in the US), male, female, rich, poor, urban, rural, East Coast, West Coast, Midwest — you’re a fan,” says Richard Young, managing director of NFL China. “Where a sport lies in the average life of a person from China is a major challenge. It’s not as central to life as it is in many Western countries.”
While this is NFL China’s current target demographic and brand positioning, it is not an end point. The NFL hopes that after gaining initial traction with this group it can market the sport to have wider appeal over time.
Young likens football in China to Facebook in its early stages of adoption, begging the question, “Would you like to put all of your personal information on this website that broadcasts it across the world?”
He suggests most people would have likely found Facebook’s value proposition a little unsettling at first. Rather than target everyone, Mark Zuckerberg focused on college students, a group generally more open socially and actively wanting to meet new people. The loss of privacy was not a big concern for this group at the time.
Choosing the right adopter group allowed Facebook to build a user base early on that could then showcase the platform’s value to the population at large. While this demonstrates the potential for a product without obvious initial mass appeal to establish its roots in an adopter group, it is difficult to see football’s benefits as having as broad an appeal as Facebook’s.
In China, many people might be concerned not about loss of privacy but of something equally basic. If football were to become pervasive among the Chinese, people might fear that traditional Chinese culture and values are being threatened.
Not being an Olympic sport is another challenge facing the NFL as it tries to make headway in China, says Young. The vast majority of Chinese people follow sports through both ethnic and national pride. Since the NFL has no nation-vs-nation competition, or a series of cascading entities like Olympic associations to promote football, the sport faces exposure and acceptance issues in China.
Breaking sport away from a sense of national pride is paramount to football’s successful integration in the country, Young says. “When people won’t be called an ‘America lover’ for liking football, then they can just like it because they love the sport. Can you imagine someone in America saying ‘I love ping-pong,’ and being called a ‘China lover’?”
The reality of game schedules spanning international time zones is another major logistical hurdle keeping Chinese people from integrating the sport into their lives. NFL games are aired on Sunday, Monday and Thursday nights in the US, which means Monday, Tuesday, and Friday mornings in China.
The NFL has made it clear that this is not something that will change. This makes it difficult for most Chinese people to actually sit down to watch a game. It also prevents them from enjoying the sport in a similar fashion to many people in the US — in the company of friends and with drinks in hand.
Young describes football’s compatibility with Chinese culture as a non-issue. His view is that “if products are good enough, cultural differences are nowhere near as divisive as people think.” He cites a comment made by one of his professors about the first McDonald’s built in China while he was a student at Beijing Normal University in 1990.
“My teacher said, ‘The only reason they’re building this McDonald’s is because more and more of you foreign tourists are coming. The Chinese will never eat hamburgers.’ It has nothing to do with culture or anything like that; it’s just a good product. Or a good experience. Take Din Tai Fung dumplings. Look at how popular that is in the US. People just want good products.”
Young went on to criticize the tendency to generalize about Chinese culture and the assumption that there aren’t subtleties and diversity that are either regionally based or specific to individual tastes.
“What’s great about this country is that there are all kinds of different people. People form the north, south, east and west are very different. And this whole homogenized look at China I always find very disappointing,” he says.
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