How Barstool Uses Primary Data to Market Their Products

In the previous post, the background and general information of Barstool Sports was discussed. In this post, a closer look into how Barstool is able to tailor their products to customers' current interests. Barstool is known for their success in T-shirt and merchandise sales. The question is, however, how do they get to be so successful in sales? How do they continue to create new ideas and stay relevant in an extremely competitive market?

The answer to these questions may be a a simple one, this being the mere fact that Barstool pays attention to their customers and what they have to say. Barstool has a huge social media presence, specifically on Twitter. Every member of the Barstool team utilizes Twitter, interacting with fans from common men to professional athletes. Dave Portnoy (President of Barstool Sports) often uses Twitter to convey company information to customers as well as receive feedback from them.

Portnoy tweeted this on September 8, 2015 regarding a potential new T-shirt idea. He received positive feedback from customers on Twitter, getting well over 300 retweets and over 1,300 favorites on the initial tweet. Portnoy ended up making the shirt and sales have been great. Customers often tweet pictures of their order or of them wearing the shirt at Portnoy and he also does a good job of getting free advertisement by retweeting them. 

Further evidence that suggests Barstool Sports uses sources of primary data like social media is an article done by Adweek on September 21, 2015. This article listed and reviewed the top-ten media publishers in the month of August. While Barstool Sports didn't quite crack the top-ten, they did make an appearance in the article:

"Barstool Sports saw the highest growth of any publisher in the month of August at 125 percent."

Adweek measures social actions which encompasses all sources of social media, including Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Youtube, etc. It records things like tweets, retweets, favorites, likes, shares, comments, among others, and measures each company's growth over time. Not only did Barstool Sports record the highest growth rate in the month of August, they recorded the highest growth rate of any month ever. This is a very impressive feat, and shows that the already popular company is still on the rise. 

To summarize, Portnoy and the Barstool Sports team are able to use social media to interact with and receive feedback from their fans. They use this primary data to make business decisions to benefit their company and increase sales. Utilizing social media is a very inexpensive way to advertise, but can be quite effective when used in the right ways. 

Genesis: The Success of Barstool Sports

Welcome all! This blog has been created with the intended purpose of examining and reviewing the marketing strategies of the company, Barstool Sports. For background, Barstool sports is a company based solely online, but still seem to manage a huge offline presence in the U.S. Barstool's purpose is to take current events (not just sports) and report them using comical spins to appeal to their readers. Their logo is shown to the left. It is clear that their target market is predominately men in their late teen years into their late 20s. They have a huge presence over students in college, myself included. Barstool was created by the self-proclaimed common man, Dave Portnoy. Barstool started as a small sports blog just in the Boston area, however, it has since branched out to other areas such as Chicago, Philadelphia, New York, Baltimore/ Washington D.C. area, Iowa, as well as having a portion of their company devoted solely to the appeal of college students known as BarstoolU.

Dave Portnoy, founder of Barstool Sports, showing his
comedic side as he claims he is just a common man

While Barstool's website and articles are free to access and read, their profits come largely from the sale of merchandise, including T-shirts, sweatshirts, shorts, hats, flags, etc. Barstool Sports, and especially Portnoy, have an incredible ability to recognize and exploit current events and niche markets to create and sell T-shirts. For example, in Boston, people are very passionate about the sports teams, and so is Barstool. They use prominent moments or things players say in an interview to create T-shirts that people will want to buy.

In light of the recent accusations brought down upon New England Patriot's quarterback Tom Brady, Portnoy took a leadership role in the support of Brady while he fought (and eventually beat) the NFL in court to vacate his suspension. Portnoy recognized the fact that people in the Boston area would undoubtedly support their beloved quarterback who has brought them so much joy. He also realized that those same people would develop a dislike towards the people responsible for the suspension (the NFL and its commissioner Roger Goodell) as well as those responsible for slandering Brady's name (ESPN for example). Portnoy used this major story in sports to his advantage and was quite successful in marketing his products.

These are just three of the many shirts Portnoy and Barstool have created. The first, the Free Brady shirt, was created almost immediately after Brady was originally suspended by the league. The second shirt, the Goodell Clown shirt, was created to ridicule the league's commissioner for his lack of hard evidence justifying his suspension of Tom Brady. And the third, the ESPN Lies shirt, was revealed after ESPN leaked multiple false reports about Tom Brady and the whole situation in general. Portnoy gives the people what they want, and the people love it.

Here is a link to their website: Barstool Sports

Disclaimer: This blog is in no way affiliated with Barstool Sports. It is simply an analysis of their marketing strategies.