Discussion #4

Google Trends on American Major Sports Championships

For this assignment, I decided to use Google Trends to compare the championships in the four major United States sports: the World Series, the Super Bowl, the NBA Finals, and the Stanley cup. I also decided to narrow this search into a three year up to date period to give a better look at current trends of this topic. The following graph shows the trends for each of these topics, as well as draws a comparison between them.

The first thing to look at is the actual popularity of each search item and how they compare to each other. In this case, based on the averages and the extremely high peaks, the Super Bowl is clearly at the top of the list as expected, with the Stanley Cup at the bottom. This is a direct indicator of which of these 4 events is the most popular among the public, which also makes it the most attractive for marketing purposes. It also gives a hint towards which of these sports may be the most popular in the country, which works in this case as the NFL is by far the largest revenue generating sport in the United States.

The next thing to look at is the trends of each search topic over the entire three year period. This one thing that sticks out here is that each sport is relatively equal at the bottom for most of the period, but have one major spike per year. This of course happens at the short time period surrounding each event. As mentioned before, the Super Bowl has the highest peak by far, which is how marketers know that it is the most popular and draws the most attention.

Digging deeper into the information provided by Google Trends, another interesting thing to look at is the Global popularity of each event. First off, the majority of activity for each of these comes from North America as expected, as it is where these events take place, as well as other countries having different dominant sports such as soccer and cricket. The stanley Cup is the only of the events in which it is more popular in Canada, which comes from the sport originating there, as well as them having 7 NHL teams. All three of the others seem to be popular in many of the other major global markets including Australia, South America, and Europe. In total though, the trend of the Super Bowl being the most popular applies again here, as it dominates for the most part globally.

While a tool such as Google Trends is very simple and accessible to everybody, it shows how tools such as this can be very useful, if not necessary for markets to maximize potential markets. This one simple search gave an insight into which sporting event, as well as which sport in general is the most popular both domestically and foreign. This allows marketers to be able to target the customers they are seeking, and not waste resources in areas that aren't needed.