SouEsporte- Creating opportunities for semi professional athletes in Brazil to grow their career together with fans and commercial parties

SouEsporte- Creating opportunities for semi professional athletes in Brazil to grow their career together with fans and commercial parties

Van der Knaap, K.W.

De Lille, C. (mentor)

Industrial Design Engineering

Design Engineering

Master of Science Strategic Product Design

2015-04-10

Creating opportunities for semi-professional athletes in Brazil The aim of the old SouEsporte platform was to bring Brazilian athletes and companies together. Due to a drop in page visits, an unclear value proposition and a lack of interaction between companies and athletes MJV Technology and Innovation, a Brazil based company, decided to pivot the platform. Before redesigning the platform an analysis of the user needs was performed to get a better understanding of the context around sports in Brazil. The primary goal of the platform is to help athletes grow their career by creating an online platform that stimulates traffic and has a business model to generate revenues. In Brazil athletes, and especially individuals, face difficulties trying to “win” the scholarships or sponsorships that help them to start a professional career. Finding the way from semi-professional the professional sports is difficult since the organizational pyramid in the sport sector is far from professionally organised. “Brazil is a great country for sports, but not for athletes” (Dacosta, 2006). To close the gap between semi-professional athletes and professional athletes, SouEsporte was pivoted into a crowdfunding platform. Crowdfunding is defined as an open call over the internet for financial resources in the form of a monetary donation, sometimes in exchange for a future product, service or other rewards (Belleflamme et al, 2011). The analysis of crowdfunding literature was the starting point of the creation of the customer journey. Several interviews were done with athletes, in which this customer journey was validated. This in turn led to the definition of , the four P’s of crowdfunding. Together with those four P’s an interaction quality was formed for SouEsporte: “the platform should act as a coach”. Additionally, several difficulties that athletes running a crowdfunding campaign might encounter were identified; the (costs of) givebacks, setting up a campaign schedule and compiling a video. To counter the difficulties of givebacks, in this thesis Crowdfunding 2.0 is suggested to bring companies and athletes together. Athletes can save money on their givebacks and companies can reach a broader audience via a new channel. Athletes promote the companies, both online and offline, and companies provide a giveback for the fans of an athlete. Introducing a third stakeholder in the crowdfunding process forms the opportunity to create a new business model compared to traditional crowdfunding platforms. Other unique features of the SouEsporte platform, like compiling a video, a pre-defined campaign schedule, live statistics and “medalise athlete” will be introduced to give SouEsporte a unique look and feel that will help athletes make the next step in their career. In a roadmap, which consists of five stages, the future steps for MJV Technology and Innovation in relation to the SouEsporte platform are described. The steps explain how to implement all functions and work together with several stakeholders to make SouEsporte a successful platform. The first stage - the prototype of the platform - will be developed by external partner in Pakistan to reduce back-end development costs. The layout and front-end development is done by MJV.

crowdfunding
sports
Brazil
talent

http://resolver.tudelft.nl/uuid:a98923a3-58fe-4fef-a662-bc33ed598edb

Campus only

22.9068, 43.1729

Student theses

master thesis

(c) 2015 Van der Knaap, K.W.