Insights from Kirsten van de Ven
One of the highlights from Kirsten van de Ven’s five years in charge of the women’s football strategy inside the Royal Dutch Football Association came during a press conference in 2018 with the KNVB’s then men’s head coach, Ronald Koeman, who described the women’s national team at the time as the blueprint for how he wanted his team to operate.
It was significant, she says, since it identified the essence of the KNVB’s culture inside its Zeist headquarters, which is built on a collaborative approach to marketing men’s, women’s and youth football, and is now bearing fruit. In December, the body was awarded a UEFA GROW Award for its KNVB Youth Marketing campaign, having inspired tens of thousands of boys and girls to take up football in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic.
Speaking to N3XT Sports ahead of the Oranjevrouwen’s defense of the UEFA European Championship title this summer, van de Ven – who also played for the Dutch national team 87 times – discusses how the KNVB’s combined men’s and women’s marketing strategies are designed to attract new audiences and new sponsors to its males and female products, including engagement around its national teams and also the evolution of the domestic top-flight Vrouwen Eredivisie women’s club competition.
1. How has fan engagement with women’s football evolved since the success of Euro 2017?
It’s important to stress that, while we have seen significant development in the women’s game since the Netherlands hosted Euro 2017, this year – in 2022 – we celebrate 50 years of women’s football. Therefore, what that shows us is that women’s football has always been improving. For instance, before 50 years ago, women weren’t able to play football. To go from that to playing in full stadiums, that’s required big steps and the game has become more visible as a result.
There are many people who have made lots of big steps for us to get to where we are today. When I was 15 years old, the women’s games weren’t on TV, so I could never see the national team play. I would have loved to have been a fan of the women’s national team and I’m sure they would have loved to have people like me as fans. What this tells us is that visibility is really key, and that digital platforms are giving women’s football a platform, particularly through social media, which is really the first time women’s football could truly reach the fan.
Even before Euro 2017, you could see that women’s football was gaining some visibility on TV and you could start to see a change in people’s mindset. Although not every women’s football game is televised, simply by increasing visibility alongside a strong social media strategy, it’s a way to reach the different types of fans who follow the women’s national team compared to those who watch the men’s games.
2. How does the Dutch women’s national team influence the KNVB digital marketing strategies?
We see many females aged 15 to 25 engaging with our women’s content but also lots of families, of whom many watch national team games. With that knowledge, we can share much more content we know those types of fans like. One of the biggest differences between the women’s football channels compared to the men’s is that they are often very active and loyal fans, and really engaged.
With visibility of the women’s game, our ability to create content that is personal to those fans then becomes really important for generating more engagement and helps connect the federation with more partners. With more partners, you can invest more in the sport and the sport becomes more interesting.
Our ability to personalize content to the fan and segment fan communications is hugely important because women’s football enables us to connect with people we may not have engaged before. Meanwhile, families are also a very interesting group for sponsors and creates a whole new market for partners to work in. We want to be inclusive and, if we are able to tailor our communications to the individual fan, this helps with growing support for the women’s game.
“Our ability to personalize content to the fan and segment fan communications is hugely important because women’s football enables us to connect with people we may not have engaged before. Meanwhile, families are also a very interesting group for sponsors and creates a whole new market for partners to work in. We want to be inclusive and, if we are able to tailor our communications to the individual fan, this helps with growing support for the women’s game.”
3. What impact did the award-winning KNVB Youth Marketing campaign have on the growth of men’s and women’s game?
We promote mixed football up to at least 11 years old, which is why we don’t have separate boys and girl’s campaigns. Our vision is that boys and girls should play together for as long as they want. In the Netherlands, women can now play in the highest amateur men’s teams. We try not to segregate men’s and women’s football too much. We know that there are differences of course at the professional level, but there is also a lot of overlap between fans. Therefore, since we promote mixed-gender football, we have one overarching marketing department to try and help increase grassroots participation.
Our main goal has been to increase membership, especially on the back of the coronavirus pandemic. When we saw fewer school pupils were playing football, we knew that, if we didn’t act, it was going to have a detrimental impact in the coming years. Therefore, by working to increase interest and participation in the sport and the national teams as part of our public Oranjefestivals, we realized the importance of connecting youth with role models, irrespective of their gender.
In response to the KNVB Youth Marketing campaign, we saw a 41,000 influx of new members between the ages of four and 12 in 2021, and then a further 59,000 in 2022 of which 18,000 were girls. It also achieved a social-organic reach of more than 1.8 million, which we were really happy about. For the children, it doesn’t matter whether they see a men’s or women’s player at our festivals, which is interesting because I would say that we, as grown-ups, are already influenced by gender-based sports. For example, before the men’s Euro 2020 tournament, there were seven years where the men’s team didn’t qualify for a tournament, so those kids had only seen the women’s national team in major tournaments.
4. What lessons are there for the growth of the Vrouwen Eredivisie top-flight club competition?
Around the time I joined the KNVB in 2017, we were still organizing the Vrouwen Eredivisie but the clubs were organizing their own commercial partners. We found that the women’s national team was like the locomotive, the driver of women’s football and that the clubs thought it would be easy to ride on their success. But that wasn’t the case. We really had to actively hook up those wagons, those clubs, to the locomotive. We then decided to help organize the league commercially and to market the league, while also adding some rights for the women’s national team, which remains the most popular part of the women’s game in the Netherlands.
Even then, it still took a while before we found a title partner for the league. We found visibility via the Dutch public-service broadcaster NOS, which has TV rights for the Eredivisie through 2023, and a wide-ranging broadcast package with ESPN, including a carriage deal with Ziggo. This shows that there is a group of fans that want to watch women’s football at a club level and that the Dutch women’s national team is still a huge driver for the visibility for the entire women’s football ecosystem. For the top league, the TV viewer still makes the biggest difference for the Eredivisie’s commercial growth.
In order to arrive where we are today, one of the first things we changed was our logo. Whereas the league’s logo used to be very traditional, the main groups we target for women’s football are families, and they like more color, so we changed our house-style to make the logo much more colorful. Meanwhile, we weren’t very active on our social media channels, which is of course a hugely important way to reach new fans since we weren’t yet on TV. From that point, we have increased engagement a lot across the Eredivisie and gives us a platform to make the league and its content more interesting.
Nevertheless, it always takes longer than you imagine to increase investment, so it helped greatly to implement a marketing plan, including changes to the Vrouwen Eredivisie image and a clear focus on types of partners we wanted to attract, including Pure Energie as the league’s naming rights partner and the two TV rights partners, who have increased visibility for the league immensely.
5. How are you leveraging interest in UEFA Euro 2022 for the growth of your domestic football viewership and participation?
Our goals don’t change for Euro 2022. I am really proud that we promote mixed-gender football at grassroots and amateur levels. It’s not up to us to divide teams by gender. We want to increase new members by 200,000 female members and we now have 162,000. While the campaign this summer will naturally be focused on women’s football, we really see a connection between the women’s national team and the men’s national team.
We don’t have a specific women’s football department. It’s a conscious choice for us to have both integrated. In the beginning, it is perhaps more beneficial to have our own department but, under one marketing department, we’re able to divide it up into specifications. The women’s team has seen the greatest level of growth in engagement in recent years compared to the men’s, so alongside our Oranjefestivals, the upcoming Euro 2022 tournament will have a positive impact on the whole game. It doesn’t matter whether it’s for the men’s game or the women’s game, both teams will be role models to our younger generations.
I will never forget when Ronald Koeman became the manager of the men’s national team, in one of his first press conferences, he said that they needed to learn from the women’s national team. He said the women’s players were really approachable and played football because they loved the game. It shows that we can learn a lot from one another and, in a way, the women’s team has been an inspiration for the men’s team. It demonstrates the importance of universal advocacy for the game, no matter the athlete’s gender.