A Tale of 3 Tigers

In college sports, there are numerous mascots used by schools across the nation: Rebels, Trojans, Longhorns, and of course the Tigers. Numerous colleges and universities utilize this ferocious cat to represent them; the University of Missouri, University of Memphis, and Louisiana State University are just three examples. Each school utilizes one marketing tool in order to communicate with fans and consumers alike, an official web page.
Each website’s home page has similar characteristics in order to keep their fans happy. Among these features are a game ticker displaying games scores from the past week and game times for the week ahead. Beyond this similarity, each ticker is placed below the title banner so it is one of the first things site visitors see. Another similar characteristic of each home page is a fan poll placed in the bottom right corner of each respective page. What do these similarities mean and what do the individual characteristics represent?
The distinct similarities represent that each school has done their research, or hired someone to do the research and found out what people look for when visiting a collegiate sports web page. Fans want to know what is going on with their team, how did the game on Saturday go, and who are they going to beat next week. All three of these questions are answered with strategically placed sports ticker at the top of the page. One may ask why put it at the top when a visitor will just look at the ticker and then go to a different web site. Well, it actually baits the fans to scroll down and read the stories and look at the photos from the games they saw on the ticker.
Each home page is not exactly the same; they may have very similar features but a website’s worth and value are determined in the eyes of visitors not by the designer. Visitors judge a website by how easy it is to maneuver the site and how it looks, plain and simple. Memphis’ athletic home page, http://gotigersgo.cstv.com/, is the least pleasing to look at and hardest to navigate. It is overwhelmingly blue, consists of boring font type, and no large, dominating photos to grasp the visitors’ attention. LSU’s website, http://www.lsusports.net/, and Mizzou’s, http://mutigers.cstv.com/, are much easier to navigate and more appeasing to the eyes. Each incorporate their school colors, like Memphis, but are not over-dominant enough to distract from the remainder of the website. The separation of these two web sites is something simple, the use and variation of font throughout the home page. Mizzou’s new site was just launched within the past month and much improved and clearly stands above the other Tiger sites.
All of these menial characteristics might seem unimportant but it is what visitors and consumers see. If something is not nice to look at and easy to move about, fans will go elsewhere and buy their merchandise and tickets at other places as well. College athletics is a business and there are profits to be made and competitors to try and take that profit away. Each tool in the marketing mix must but work together and be near perfect to attract new customers and retain the existing.