Sports Memorabilia Business Plan

The sports collectible market is huge, particularly for sport jerseys. The ages of collectors ranges from young kids to grown adults. With the growing popularity of eBay, sport collectible trading has become even more popular with a much more open market. Jerseys has segmented the market into two niches, children and adults. In general the children are most interested in the baseball and football jerseys with the adults showing primary interest in the cycling jerseys.

Jerseys will employ different strategies to market itself to the two different market segments. While Jerseys will use an active marketing strategy, they will also rely on walk-by traffic as an excellent source of walk-in customers.

4.1 Market Segmentation

Jerseys will be targeting two distinct types of customers. Each one has its own distinct demographics.

• Children: these are kids typically ages seven to 15. They often participate in sports but are also caught up in viewing/following of professional sports and enjoy collecting memorabilia. While this group does not have significant amounts of discretionary income, a function of their age, they typically do get an allowance and save their money for purchases relating to sports.
• Adults: this market segment is typically very active in sports, they either play sports or follow it religiously. To them, nothing would be better than to stay in front of a TV for the entire Saturday or Sunday watching all the different games that day. Sixty-five percent of the adults that collect memorabilia began as a child and have continued into adulthood. The average income of this group $45,000. Fifty-five percent have at least some college education. This group enjoys to watch sports, while most of the observations occur with the TV, this group views live sports at least 10 times a year.

4.2 Target Market Segment Strategy

Jerseys recognizes the need to try to communicate to both segments of the market and that a campaign must be developed separately for each group. Of the advertising that Jerseys will be undertaking, some will be utilizing magazines with primary child readership demographics for the child market, and adult publications for the adult segment. To attract additional child attention, Jerseys will also sponsor a few little leagues to ensure a presence among the children. The walk-in traffic of the store will be primarily adults as the store is located in a busy commercial retail area of the city and while some children do walk through the city browsing, the walk-in traffic will be primarily adult.

4.3 Industry Analysis

The sport collectibles market is made up primarily of mom and pop stores. There are very few larger stores or chains. This is the case to a large degree due to the fact that the products are used, one of a kind items. They are often hard to come by, thereby limiting the ability of a larger store to buy larger quantities, leveraging scales of economy.

The popularity of eBay has significantly increased the quantity of trades in the U.S., opening up the market for a much larger audience. While the market has opened up significantly, prices have seemed to rise. It can be speculated that the prices have risen due to the phenomenon of a bidding frenzy where people get all worked up about winning the auction and bid irrationally, relying on emotion to guide them through the auction. Because Jerseys has inside market knowledge, it is able to avoid the auctions that are unreasonably high and concentrate on the auctions that have gone unnoticed and are soliciting low bids. The high bid phenomenon of eBay therefore supplies a steady stream of customers to Jerseys because the customers are looking for reasonable prices, as well as the ability to touch ad feel before they purchase.

4.3.1 Competition and Buying Patterns

Jerseys R Us faces two sources of competition:

• Local sports collectible retail stores. There are two other retail stores in the city, however they tend to concentrate more on equipment than clothing.
• eBay. This is a good source for the same products that Jerseys‘ sells, however, prices are not always reasonable.

The buying habits of customers depends to a large degree on age and amount of knowledge they have regarding the market. The younger the customer, the more likely they will want to touch and feel what they are buying. The older the customer, the more they are willing to rely on a description of the item for their purchase as opposed to needing to see it in person. Additionally, the more information they have about the market, the more confident they are about bidding or buying something somewhat unknown since they can speculate its worth.