Fair or not, the relationship between sports teams and their fans often lies outside the control of the team's marketing department and directly with the win-loss record. Following three straight playoff seasons, the NBA's Memphis Grizzlies had a tough 2006-2007 campaign. The team ultimately won only 22 games, down from 49 the year before. It caused a real dilemma.

"As much as you like to think wins and losses don't matter that much in the grand scheme of things, they do," says Dennis O'Connor, the Grizzlies' vice president of ticket sales and strategy. "People are spending a lot of money to come to the games and be entertained. If we're not entertaining them, they're going to stay at home."

Complicating O'Connor's job even further is the small size of the Memphis market. This gives the team less room for error, in O'Connor's opinion. "We tick off one fan, he's going to tell 20 more. And unlike in some larger markets, there aren't 20 people lined up to buy that guy's tickets."

Fan phone-in
So at the end of last season, O'Connor and the Grizzlies made a conscious decision to bulk up the volume and quality of contact the team has with its fan base. Central to the effort was a collaboration with voice-messaging-services supplier Vontoo, which helped the team coordinate a program targeting casual fans.

The Grizzlies dipped into its database of the 6,000 customers who purchased single game tickets within the previous 12 months. Then O'Connor and his team crafted a phone message inviting fans to "Rudy Gay night," which was recorded by forward Gay himself and sent to each fan.

O'Connor admits that he had some reservations about the one-to-one-ish phone campaign, especially given that it followed a local election campaign that besieged voters with similar recordings. The results surprised him: about 1,500 tickets sold and zero complaints, netting approximately $33,000 in revenue. "Although people know it's a recorded message, it's still neat -- 'Hey, I got a call from Rudy Gay,'" O'Connor says.

Just the beginning
O'Connor believes the initiative's true value was revealing just how badly the team's fans wanted more personalized communications. From the day it arrived in Memphis from Vancouver in 2001, the Grizzlies have been a community mainstay, donating nearly $18 million to charities and running programs like the Grizzlies Academy, which mentors academically at-risk teenagers. But the response to the phone message program let O'Connor know that the team needed to do more for and with its best customers.

In addition to regular lunches and dinners with season ticket holders attended by players, coaches, and executives -- "it's more like 10 to one than one to one, to be honest," O'Connor says -- the Grizzlies now meet monthly with an official fan advisory board to discuss everything from player trades to the fan experience. "One of the things that came out of there was that in a town like Memphis, you can't treat people like they're just a number. They want more of a relationship with us and we're doing our best to give it to them," O'Connor says.

In one anecdote that O'Connor recalls, a season ticket holder said she didn't want to renew for this season because she was unhappy with the parking situation. "[Team president of business operations] Andy [Dolich] said, 'You renew now, you can have my parking spot.' She said, 'Done!'" O'Connor says.

Since the initial phone-message initiative, the team has employed the same tactic for season-ticket renewals and other promotions, with similarly positive results, although he declines to reveal specifics. This year O'Connor hopes to link the messages directly to the team's box office, enabling spur-of-the-moment sales to fans charmed by the direct contact. The team will also continue to build more individual components into as many of its communications and interactions as possible.

"Everything we do boils down to one-on-one," O'Connor says, quickly adding, "And hopefully the team plays a little better, too."