Las Vegas Sun

March 28, 2024

Marketing team hopes to match Golden Knights’ success on the ice

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Steve Marcus

Kristopher Knief, director of business intelligence for the Vegas Golden Knights, poses in a suite at T-Mobile Arena on Wednesday, March 14, 2018.

The Golden Knights have had unprecedented success on the ice this year, and now it’s the job of the marketing team to replicate that success on the business side.

Helping lead the endeavor is newly appointed Director of Business Intelligence Kristopher Knief.

The 29-year-old was hired from the New York Yankees in January. Before that, he worked with Golden Knights Senior Vice President and Chief Marketing Officer Brian Killingsworth for the Tampa Bay Buccaneers.

Knief hopes to put the Golden Knights on the leading edge of emerging technologies in sports and brand marketing. For now, he is a team of one but hopes to make some hires and has embraced the chance to build a team from scratch.

Knief spoke during a question-and-answer session with professional analysts, data scientists and the Las Vegas Sun regarding his role within the organization.

What makes marketing hockey difficult in particular?

It’s a very niche market. It’s more expensive to play when you’re younger, so, ultimately, we have to do a better job of getting kids when they’re let’s say 8 to grow with our brand and the game of hockey. That’s why we hired our senior manager of community outreach, because we are trying to grow the game of hockey in Summerlin, Henderson and the Las Vegas metropolitan area. If you can put sticks in their hand, they’re not going to forget it.

Do you think the Golden Knights are one of the more innovative sports teams you’ve worked with?

My goal is to be the most innovative brand in all of sports. That comes with a dollar amount tied to it, but, ultimately, if you can be more innovative, you can try more things. We are in a market where we are allowed to try a lot of different things. We aren’t there yet, but we want to become that.

Like you said, there is a dollar amount attached to that strategy, and Bill Foley has shown he’s not afraid to pay to improve this team. How much easier does that make your job?

I think yes, but you have to show the value proposition that the investment is going to return. If you don’t, then it’s a losing battle. But if you can show that, they hired you for a reason. But he needs the value proposition in order for you to go forward with an idea.

Innovation is a vague word. Can you give a tangible example of how the team wants to be innovative?

I want to keep very broad because we don’t have anything solid in place yet, but we want to use different strategies that have never been seen before to maximize ticketing and to create the innovative content for our partnerships team.

We want to create the most unique fan experience through mobile apps, which includes virtual reality and augmented reality, because, ultimately, if you can engage a fan from driveway to driveway, you can’t beat that.

That’s what we need to achieve, but we are still working toward it. We’re almost there.

Obviously, it’s easier to gain support for a winner. How much do you think the team’s initial success in its inaugural season has helped get the fans hooked?

The success on the ice is unprecedented, and if we didn’t have it, I think it would be more challenging. But they are hooked ultimately because we have supported them from the moment we started our ticket drive. And they also supported the team the moment the ticket drive started.

We are ultimately trying to create a family here in Las Vegas, and that can’t happen with us being silent or the community being silent. We have to have camaraderie and the community has supported us in every way possible.

How do you do that, and have you already seen the benefits of what you’ve done?

We try to support the community as much as possible. There are unfortunate things that the team supported the community on like the 1 October shooting, but we also on a yearly basis have the Foley Foundation, the 51/49 raffles every night. We are ingrained as much as possible in the community because, ultimately, we want to support the community so they’ll support us. It’s why we put the season ticket holders’ names in the ice before the season. Everyone thinks the hockey players are playing for themselves, but they’re playing for themselves plus the city, because we are one gigantic family.

From a ticket-sales perspective, we are sold out almost every single night with approximately 103 percent capacity per game. Our standing room only is through the roof. I’ve never seen anything like it. Just the game day experience is like you’ve never seen. I come from the New York Yankees who just went through a playoff run this year, and the first game I came to (for the Golden Knights) I had never experienced anything like it.

But you have to be planning now, just in case the success on the ice doesn’t continue, right?

I tell our president all the time that I look at years one and two as outliers, because every team is going to go through highs and lows. You’re never going to have all highs, and you’ll hopefully never have all lows, but you need to be ready for them. If you’re not, you’re going to be in a real uphill battle that you probably won’t win.

We need to put the systems in place that will help us maximize our foundation, and that will help with longevity going forward.

What is coming in the future to make sure you’re following the sports marketing industry?

I think that’s a gigantic offseason project. We have not gotten to that point yet, but the more we can start modeling and projecting out what we need to hit, the better. It’s just been a (workforce) issue, and we just haven’t had the time to start it.

We are in somewhat of a honeymoon phase right now. Because the team is having so much success on the ice, our ticket sales are in such a positive place that we can focus on strengthening our partnerships team to sell to not only the local market but the national market to take that next step.

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