I have always been a blue sky thinker when it comes to Scottish football. That could be on the recruitment side of things, marketing efforts, long-term planning strategy or anything else that is involved in the running of a club. We continually listen to the reasons why our clubs can’t do things.

With that in mind, we, at Pure Fitbaw, felt that we could create something that might help inspire clubs and fans to take action or explore what the realms of possibility are to increase revenue, put a long-term strategy in place and improve the future of their club.

A hypothetical club was born. 

To help bring it to life, we created a club based on the idea of an average Scottish football club. Things like the geography and demographics of the city or town were outlined plus some finer details of the club from a financial point of view.

With this club profile created, it was sent off to our chosen experts for this first task to try amd improve Club X. Michael Bochel and Chris Samson host the Scottish Football Marketing Podcast and they were tasked with trying to improve the marketing efforts of the club.

The brief set out is below. What would Club X do to achieve these things? Whether they had to put a strategy in place for the overall club was deliberately loose to allow for some creative freedom but also from my experience in speaking to people who work at clubs. The tasks they’re expected to carry out are vague at times, and they’re expected to “just do” without linking it back to overall “why” for the marketing department, and club overall.

Michael and Chris took to their keyboards and produced their plans. You’ll be able to find links to view those plans further down the post but the link to listen to the podcast is below too. It’s an hour and a half of brilliant content and exactly what I was looking for when I set them the task to improve Club X’ marketing.

Both Michael and Chris outlined the importance of setting our an overall strategy first of all. What is the goal of Club X? Why do you exist? What followed was a lot of examples of how to engage with fans, how to earn more revenue and answers to those specific tasks around player sponsorship and turning round sales in the club shop and food kiosks.

What are your thoughts? How would you turn Club X’ fortunes around and getting them looking to the future with positivity? Here’s a link to the Club X brief for you to go away and fill in some examples yourself. Once you’ve done that, share your thoughts with us @PureFitbaw on Twitter.

Need some inspiration? Michael and Chris‘ documents can be found by clicking their names.

Stay tuned for a future Club X podcast.