From Branding to Drafting: Marketing Lessons for Fantasy Football Success

From Branding to Drafting: Marketing Lessons for Fantasy Football Success Todd Cole, Senior Brand Strategist

Marketing and fantasy football. On the surface, these two things may not seem like they are in the same plane of existence. I guess that’s true in that one is a very real thing while the other is essentially make-believe, but what I’ve found after years of doing both is that they both satisfy my love of strategic challenges and understanding of consumer psychology and behaviors. So, when I was asked to do an end-of-summer blog — the time when fantasy football seasons are starting — I saw the opportunity to share some of the key marketing principles and lessons that I have applied to fantasy football over the years. Here are just a couple ways that thinking like a marketer can help you dominate your fantasy football league:

Avoid the Sunk-Cost Fallacy

In both marketing and fantasy football, the sunk-cost fallacy can lead to poor decisions. This phenomenon occurs when people continue investing in something just because they’ve already put resources into it. In fantasy football, this might mean holding onto a high draft pick who’s underperforming. But the smart move is recognizing when to let go. If you notice this fallacy playing out with one of your opponents, you can turn it to your advantage, like offering a trade that seems to add value to their struggling pick. It’s a strategy marketers commonly use to upsell customers who have already committed to a purchase, like when you order a pizza online and then get an offer at checkout to add dessert and drink for a few dollars more. It works at the point of sale, and it can work for your fantasy trades, too.

Leveraging Brand Bias

Brand bias is when consumers prefer one brand over another due to emotional or psychological connections. In fantasy football, this translates to managers who have a clear preference for certain types of players. By understanding these biases, you can predict their draft choices or use their favorite types of players as leverage in trades, much like how a marketer would use brand loyalty metrics or buyer personas to help predict consumer behavior. This is helpful when you know that other league members like to draft high-upside guys, like speedy wide receivers or value the point advantages of taking elite tight ends early. These are markers for brand bias that you can use to snag the players you want ahead of league mates during fantasy drafts.

Researching the Competition

Which brings us to researching your competition. Just as marketers analyze competitors to gain an edge, fantasy football managers must research their opponents. Understanding your league mates’ tendencies allows you to anticipate their moves and adjust your strategy. In marketing, finding gaps in the competition’s offerings can lead to new opportunities — just as spotting weaknesses in your opponents’ strategies can give you an advantage in your fantasy league.

Using KPIs to Make Decisions

In marketing, we rely on key performance indicators (KPIs) to guide our strategies. The same logic applies in fantasy football. Your league’s scoring rules should help you make informed decisions. For instance, if one quarterback is on a hot streak but facing a tough defense, while another has been cold but is up against a weak opponent, you need to analyze the data to decide who to start to give you the best chance to score. This mirrors how marketers use data to forecast outcomes and make strategic decisions with media spends and direct marketing tactics.

These are just a few basic marketing lessons that can help you gain a competitive advantage in your fantasy league. But just like in marketing, the more you pay attention to the trends and watch the way markets move, the more likely you are to have success in fantasy football. Start putting these principles to use this year and before you know it, you won’t just be playing fantasy football — you’ll be mastering it.

Good luck to all my fellow fantasy footballers out there.

EBSI > NPS

Introducing a new measure of an employer’s brand strength that is more inclusive than Net Promoter Score.

On a scale of 0 to 10, how likely are you to recommend this company to a friend or colleague?

If this question looks familiar, then you’re probably already familiar with Net Promoter Score® (NPS)1. For 20 years, it has been a bellwether metric for quantifying customer satisfaction and brand loyalty. With one easy-to-answer question, organizations of all sizes have been able to calculate the health of their customer engagement with a remarkably simple formula:

(Brand Promoters (scores of 9-10) − Brand Detractors (scores of 0-6)) ÷ Sample Size × 100

While the NPS formula is highly valuable in distilling customer sentiment down to a single number, the strategy team at Aloysius Butler and Clark (AB&C) felt we could develop a more robust measure of brand loyalty, especially in terms of recruiting and retaining talent. We put our 50-plus years of experience with qualitative branding research to use to develop a more complete measure of an employer’s brand strength, one that includes audience satisfaction, perception of employer reputation and NPS. It’s a calculation we call Employer Brand Strength Index™ (EBSI).

While it has the ease of use and simplicity of the traditional NPS, our proprietary EBSI measurement tool brings in more metrics that are tailored to individual organizations and their specific industries. Our measurement includes perceptions of current employees as well as external audiences, allowing us to benchmark external assessments of employer brands against internal reflections of employment experiences. Organizations are able to include their NPS and employment reputation into a measure that allows them to monitor the success of what is being promoted in the market.

And with the introduction of factor weights measured with a five-point Likert scale (see table below), we can refine the EBSI to help calculate overall employer brand health.

The EBSI can be used as a reliable predictor of employer brand strength and employee engagement. The inclusion of the EBSI in a recruiter’s toolbox provides talent acquisition and talent engagement teams a comprehensive additional key performance metric. The EBSI is a benchmark measure that should be reviewed over time to adjust operational practices and recruitment marketing messages to continually improve an organization’s employment brand to attract prospective employees and enhance employee loyalty.


  1. In 2003, Fred Reichheld, a partner at Bain & Company, Inc. created the NPS metric.

Four UPDATED Marketing Resolutions for 2021

In January 2016, I wrote a blog titled “Four Marketing Resolutions for 2016.” I cited research identifying that “people who write down their specific resolutions are 10 times more likely to attain their goals than people who don’t make specific resolutions.”[1] So I made my marketing resolutions public:
Read full post...

May 26, 2020

Navigating the Next Normal in Higher Education

By David Brond and Kathleen Doyle

The world as we knew it has changed. This is also true across the entire landscape of higher education.

May 1 was National College Decision Day, the traditional deadline for high school seniors to pick their college or university. In 2020 unfortunately, thanks to the COVID-19 pandemic, this important decision has become more difficult than ever for students and parents. The pandemic is also having—and going to have—a profound impact on the future of institutions of higher learning across the country.Read full post...

Facing the Ultimate Marketing Challenge: Bringing a New Brand to Market…Yours!

Inevitably at some point during your healthcare marketing career you will be faced with bringing a new brand to market. As you do, it is critical to stay focused on the strategic and business objectives of your organization, while also protecting the equity of your brand. The following scenarios describe bringing a new brand to a market, assuming you currently have standing or brand value. The goal in both cases is to leverage the equity of all the brands to enhance your brand, differentiate you from competitors and better serve your customers.

Read full post...

Building and Maintaining Great Agency Relationships

Over the past four-plus decades, AB&C has worked with some of the most premier healthcare systems across this country—large and small—and we greatly value those relationships. But great agency-client relationships just don’t happen; they take true commitment by both parties to be successful. And over the years, we have learned what makes a great working relationship and want to share that knowledge with you, because agencies, while a source of expense, are also an investment, and have a key impact on your organization and your ability to meet patient and provider needs, delivery quality care and build your brand.

Read full post...

How to Socialize Your Brand

If you followed a systematic approach to build a new brand (or refreshed an existing one), you started with discovery research. You then developed a brand mantra to inform how your brand would be articulated to internal audiences and the outside world. Finally, you created or refined the outward expressions, such as the name, mark and colors.

All of this hard work was done in preparation to share your brand with stakeholders and customers. This is when the rubber hits the road. It’s important to invest as much time, and as many resources, into properly socializing and managing your brand as it is to develop, create and refine it.

Read full post...

The Writing Workshop: Basics of Punctuation

In professional communications of any kind, proper punctuation is essential. But this is especially true for marketing communications, where the copy helps define a brand. Grammar and punctuation mistakes can result in a loss of credibility—for both the agency and its clients. Here are a few tips for avoiding common mistakes.

Read full post...

The Essence of a Brand Mantra

As branding experts, we have developed our own vocabulary for what we do and how we help organizations define and present themselves to consumers. We use terminology like “brand architecture,” “platform,” “positioning,” “promise,” “proof point,” “personality,” “identity” and “tag line” to describe how we create, communicate and control the attributes of a brand. An important but often overlooked step in the process of building or revitalizing a brand is the development of a brand mantra.

Read full post...

How to Use Customer Testimonials to Improve Your B2B Marketing

Nobody has to tell you that the B2B sales cycle differs greatly from that of a B2C. For one, a B2B sale typically involves a much larger expense. It’s also a highly vetted decision, and not often an impulsive one. Specifiers, designers, engineers and choosy purchasing agents rarely rush to buy your product or service immediately after seeing an ad, direct mail or email.

Read full post...

Secrets of Successful Networking

As a managing director at AB&C, I often attend events on behalf of my firm, where I walk into a room and strike up a conversation with complete strangers, or give the opening remarks to a crowd of unfamiliar faces. Today, I get excited about these opportunities to promote our agency. But once upon a time, networking was an uncomfortable experience for me, characterized by nervous glances around the room, a sweaty brow and awkward silences.

Read full post...

Achieving Success Along the Customer Journey

Ever since there’s been the practice of marketing communications, there’s been a concept inseparable from it: the customer journey. If you understood your target audience and could communicate effectively at each stage of their purchasing journey, you’d do OK in the marcom profession.

Read full post...