Swot Analysis For Red Sox

Threats
A threat for the Red Sox organization could be the increase in dorm buildings in the city and the push by the Mayor to get students back into dorm housing to make room for families in the city. If students are living in dorm buildings again there will most likely be an increase of students going home for the summer and thus not as many students to target between the months of May and September. Another article also stated that because of these trends in college consumers the costs of certain advertising methods has gone up. There seems to be more competition between sports teams and social platforms advertising that has created price increases and the best spots are reserved for the highest bidder. This may pose a threat for

the Red Sox as it can be very expensive to the organization. As said by Jill Sherman, senior vice president for social strategy at the digital agency DigitasLBi, “We’re entering a time when there are going to be a phenomenal number of opportunities for brands.” This is true also for the Red Sox in the race for building a stronger fan base with concentration on the college students in the area. The ability of a fan to be more engaged in real time sports is creating many new advertising promotional strategies on all platforms and is increasing the amount of sports teams battling for advertisement space on media platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and Snapchat (Ember, 2015).
Another threat to consider for the program is the emotion of feeling left out.

Many students when they come to college want the experience the college lifestyle, which consists of drinking and hanging out with groups of friends throughout the weekend or during the weekdays. Even though the Red Sox may offer $9 tickets for college students they are also in competition with the college student lifestyle. A study by Wechsler stated, " that 44% of all college students surveyed over 140 campuses claimed themselves as binge drinkers or heavy drinkers"(2015). This provides a weakness to the Red Sox attendance because the college lifestyle offers college students the ability to go out and party with others. They have a mindset of not wanting to miss out on the party atmosphere and the fun that could have occurred there while they were attending the Red Sox game. The parties can create friendships and they have little to no cost to the students.
Methodology
The methodology of this research project included both qualitative methods and quantitative methods. The qualitative methods were used for primarily background information and specific examples of respondents that would be considered part of the target market. The quantitative methods included a distributed survey and a collection and analysis of the results using statistical software.

Qualitative
Qualitative data is harder to analyze than the quantitative data, but provides beneficial insights on personalized information given directly from the target market. The first method of collecting qualitative data was through exploratory surveys. Questions were created before the survey to guide the direction of the answers and then conversation was created about the subject. One group member sat down with a Suffolk University student named Eric, who is a strong New England sports fan and has been to several Red Sox games in the past. The second interview was conducted with Nick, who is also a strong New England sports fan, but whose primary interests lie in football, baseball, and hockey.
The second form of qualitative data gathered was through open-ended questions in the distributed survey. The following questions were included in the survey and answered by a majority of the respondents: “Can you please tell us why you would be (Very Unlikely to Very Likely) to purchase a ticket through #Student9s program next season,” and “Please tell us about the best time you ever had at Fenway.” These questions allowed for respondents to write answers, with only a number of characters limitation, to express a more exploratory set of data to be analyzed in a qualitative manner.
Quantitative
Quantitative data was the main focus of this research as it allowed for more in depth statistical testing to be done to create accurate results for the Red Sox.

Marketing students in specific classes created surveys using Qualtrics; the best questions from these surveys were aggregated by the professors and then administered via email in a convenience sampling method. This means students and professors emailed the survey to other students at Suffolk, students at other schools, friends, and others. The survey information was collected for a period of a couple weeks before being inactive. The results of the survey were then gathered by the professors and properly put into the statistical software SPSS for analysis. The graphs below show a demographic overview of the respondents to give a better understanding of the

data.