The rise of Internet commerce has resulted in greater efforts to measure success. The industry no longer accepts “hits” as an index of popularity, because “hits” is a technical measure of the number of files served. The industry standard is “unique visitors” as well as the average time a visitor spends at a given site (typically per month).
Street & Smith’s Sports Business Journal offer regular features that analyze marketing per- formance. These include attendance variations as a function of special promotions such as bobblehead giveaways, mascot birthday parties, or fireworks; Internet popularity; television ratings; and radio penetration.
Likewise, academic journals such as the sport Marketing Quarterly and the Journal of Sport Management have fostered public dialogue on the strengths and weaknesses of measurements such as signage exposure, consumer recall and recognition, and economic impact studies.
Consulting firms such as J.D. Power and Associates have provided teams with customer service assessments.
As we discussed in chapter 3, indexes are always subject to debate. But they must be developed in order to be debated and tested in the marketplace, so the trends noted earlier are all to the good, for the industry, its marketers, and its consumers.