The NBA wanted to uncover meaningful insights from basketball fans’ emerging behaviors to evolve their Arena experience and implement exciting innovations on and off the court.

The league, however, had very little insight into pain-points from their current experience and overall needs, motivations and expectations of fans. It was eager to identify opportunity areas for future innovation, so it decided to run a qualitative research study to get to the minds and hearts of fans.

The Innovation team at the NBA brought me in to conduct in-depth digital ethnographies with a group of fans from various league clubs. The league had clear research objectives, but needed help developing the study, selecting the right tool and running it. With a small budget and tight deadline, we needed to be nimble and get to insights in just a few weeks.

I fully designed and executed the study, recommending the methodology and managing the platform provider, writing detailed discussion guides and moderating / interacting with fans daily during its 1-week duration. Based on our learning objectives, I crafted a set of open-ended questions and “missions” for fans that would help us gather a wide range of inputs through a mix of descriptive, exploratory and generative questions (e.g., “Tell me about your first basketball game memory”, “If you had a gold ticket to go to any entertainment event, what would that be?”). Our goal was to surface deeper associations and emotions along with more straightforward impressions of live basketball game experiences.

Upon completing the study, I analyzed learnings — finding patterns in what we were hearing — and organized findings into 8 key themes as a robust research report that also included additional Gen Z demographic desk research. This document included rich data points to substantiate each theme, such as quotes and videos.

The NBA has leverage the study, among other research initiatives, to continue to provide fans with new, exciting experiences and strengthen its brand community.

The league has since launched a free-to-play fantasy basketball game and continues to leverage new technologies to enhance fan’s experiences.