Blog 3 - Columbia Fireflies

On Thursday, April 19th I attended a Columbia Fireflies minor league baseball game. This game,  matched the Fireflies up with the Hickory Crawdads, the single A farm team of the Texas Rangers. On this day, students of USC were given free admittance with Carolina Card, which was a marketing tool. The student in attendance also received a free meal voucher, for a small hotdog, Lays chips, and a Pepsi product. For those of age, it was half off South Carolina brewed beer as well. Similar to that of a professional baseball game, the stadium is lined with advertisements and sponsors, mostly dealing with food and drink. Also, the back wall of the playing field is lined with advertisements, from banks to real estate companies, it has it all. Each refreshment cup also had a "Palmetto Citizens" advertisement on it, showing that everything is used as a marketing tool at a baseball game. In between batters, the advertisement on the scoreboard in left field changed, as well as the sponsor mentioned by the announcer. In between innings, the marketing team had a t-shirt toss in place to increase brand awareness of the sponsors as well as incorporate the interest of the fans. The 7th inning stretch was brought to the fans by "Pepsi" as a plethora of advertisements were thrown up on the scoreboard during the brief intermission. The grounds crew was also used as a marketing tool, dancing with their sponsored equipment during the 7th inning stretch. Overall, almost every aspect of the stadium of a semi-professional baseball game is used to market the different sponsors a team has, which is similar to that of a MLB game, in comparison. 

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