Sports marketing professionals will certainly be familiar with the name of Jon Spoelstra, one of the most celebrated innovators and practitioners of sports marketing over the past thirty years. Together with Veeck, Hagstrom, Levine and other renowned marketers from the major American professional leagues between the 1980s and 1990s, Spoelstra created some of the most memorable sports communication campaigns ever conceived — remarkable for their delirious creativity and uncanny ability to walk the line between good and bad taste. The most iconic was what became known as the “rubber chicken day”: in 1994, as marketing director of the New Jersey Nets, Spoelstra had thousands of rubber chickens placed in courier boxes and sent to every season ticket holder who had not yet renewed, accompanied by the message “Don’t Fowl Out” — a pun on “don’t foul out” and the word fowl, meaning chicken.

What makes this episode more than just a marketing anecdote: the Nets were at that time one of the least competitive franchises in the NBA. Spoelstra had no better product to sell. He had the same product — and had to find a way to make it desirable. It is from this tension, between an unchangeable product and a public that doesn’t want it, that the Jump-Start Marketing theory was born.

Jump Start Marketing: What It Is and Where It Comes From

The metaphor Spoelstra chose was not accidental. A Jump-Start — starting a car with jumper cables when the battery is completely dead — describes exactly the starting situation: a product that isn’t moving, a public that isn’t buying, and the need to find external energy to get the system running again. The end goal, however, is not a different product: it is the same product, seen differently.

The conditions for applying the theory are precise and non-negotiable: Jump-Start Marketing applies only to existing sports products, unchangeable in their nature, that are not achieving the expected success. This is the case, for example, of a team that is uncompetitive at the start of a season, or an event that struggles to fill seats despite the potential of the discipline. This is not a product development theory: it is a repositioning theory.

“If people aren’t buying your product — Spoelstra argues — there’s a reason. Things don’t happen by accident. Jump-Start Marketing doesn’t mean taking a product nobody wants and forcing it down consumers’ throats. Rather, it means taking a product nobody wants and repositioning and reforming it until it becomes something they can’t do without.”

The 19 Rules of Jump Start Marketing

There are 19 rules, or best practices, for a Jump-Start campaign in sports marketing. These rules were so codified that during his time with the New Jersey Nets, Spoelstra gave every member of the marketing office a small handbook with all 19 points, to ensure they were followed scrupulously.

1. If you want results, you and your entire team must be highly motivated to try new approaches and unconventional models to reposition the product quickly.
2. Never believe you are something different from what you are. Accept the realistic limitations of the product you have and start from there.
3. Increase your customers’ purchase frequency. No matter how poor your product or service is: the first thing you must ensure is that you have customers. Strategically, it is essential to increase the volume of sales to these customers and reposition the product first and foremost in their eyes.
4. Always find a way to get the name, surname, address and phone number of your customers or subscribers. If you sell through a distributor, you will lose this opportunity. But if you have this information, you can sell to them forever.
5. The janitor won’t be the one to sound the charge. The most effective impulse always comes from the top.
6. Trigger big changes through small experiments. Use small but constant ideas, make small tweaks that don’t cost much time or money but could bring great results, without focusing on massive, unwieldy campaigns. For this reason, Spoelstra always promoted the creation of a “marketing terrorist group for innovation” within the teams he worked with — a kind of guerrilla marketing team tasked with devising disruptive marketing actions.
7. Don’t wait for a crisis before trying new approaches. Keep innovating at all times.
8. For every marketing action you plan, always make sure to find a good way to get it approved by your bosses. Prepare the defence of your idea with the same care and passion as a lawyer who has to appear before the Supreme Court.
9. Only sell products and services that customers want to buy.
10. Sports marketing is not done at a desk behind a telephone. It is done among people, in the middle of the crowd, on the sidelines of the field. When there is a game or an event, management must be the first to arrive and the last to leave.
11. Don’t try to make everyone your customer. Instead, carefully select your target and spend time and resources only on them. This is why you must have every possible piece of data and information about them.
12. Don’t trust research done by someone else, data bought from someone else, or information brought to you by someone else. If you want to know something about your customers, talk to your customers. The vast majority of marketing problems can be solved more effectively with 10 minutes over coffee with one of your subscribers than with a hundred-thousand-dollar research project.
13. Make your customers heroes. Especially for corporate clients, produce reports and documentation useful to show their superiors that every dollar spent with your team is money well spent.
14. Create incentives for creativity, passion, innovation.
15. Make every deal too good to refuse. Create packages, products, bundles and events so enticing they cannot be ignored, even if doing so means moving away from your product’s core business. Spoelstra used this criterion when, to increase ticket sales, he created a “family” package that included 4 match tickets, a dinner inside the stadium and complimentary drinks, all at the price of a single traditional ticket. The team made very little on each ticket, but the event sold out, with a momentum effect for the rest of the season.
16. Involve and leverage other departments of the organisation. Marketing cannot be confined to a single office: it must be shared with sales, administration, management.
17. Differentiate between small and large clients. According to the Pareto principle, 20% of your customers account for 80% of your revenue. The greatest efforts and attention must be directed towards this stronger, more important core.
18. In difficult economic times for the organisation, instead of laying off staff, hire more people willing to work on commission, earning solely from the results they deliver.
19. Set ambitious goals and find the most enjoyable way to achieve them.

Jump Start Marketing and Sports Sponsorships: Applications in 2024

What strikes you, reading these 19 rules nearly thirty years later, is how little they have aged. They speak of listening to the customer rather than relying on abstract market research, of motivating the team to take small risks before making large investments, of making every package “too good to refuse” — principles that apply just as well to an NBA team struggling in the 1990s as to a brand exploring motorsport sponsorships as a communication platform today.

Rule 6 — small experiments before large investments — and Rule 13 — document results to superiors convincingly — describe exactly the challenge of a marketing manager who must bring a sponsorship budget justification to the board of directors. Rule 15 — make every deal too good to refuse — mirrors the logic with which the best agencies build custom sponsorship packages: you don’t sell a logo on a livery, you sell a system of activations, hospitality, content and rights that makes it hard to say no.

Jump-Start Marketing, in this sense, is not only a theory for struggling sports properties: it is a sales philosophy that recognises the value of creative packaging as a conversion lever.

Ice to the Eskimos

The book in which Spoelstra lays out his theories is called “Ice to the Eskimos”. The title is not a joke: it is a declaration of method. Spoelstra does not say the product must be transformed into something it is not. He says that every product, even one that seems impossible to sell, has an audience — as long as you find the right frame to present it.

This is something sponsors, agencies and sports properties in motorsport can no longer afford to ignore. And which, in a market where attention has fragmented and audiences have multiplied, should today be leveraged with even more systematically than Spoelstra did with his rubber chickens in 1994.

Frequently Asked Questions about Jump Start Marketing