Hard Rock Stadium
In an age when streaming media and “Netflix and chill” culture threatens to make hermits of us all, Centerplate, an event venue catering and hospitality company that services top stadium and venues, has pivoted its model from transactions to experiences to keep people coming out to see live entertainment. I spoke with CMO Bob Pascal on this fundamental shift and how they’re tapping into unique local cuisine and delivering on premium service in order to make it “better to be there.”
In fact, Centerplate is providing the hospitality for the 150th running of the Belmont Stakes this weekend at Belmont Park, where Justify will vie for the Triple Crown in front of an expected 90,000 spectators.
Aaron Kwittken: Centerplate was acquired by Sodexo, the international food services and facilities management company, in late 2017. Let’s start by discussing, especially from a marketing perspective, how being owned by a foreign company is making Centerplate more competitive and more marketable?
Bob Pascal: When you look at it from a market perspective, it makes so much sense. Sodexo delivers about $24 billion in quality of life services. They are historically under-indexed in sports and leisure, especially in North America, which is the biggest sports and leisure market. The acquisition brought the power of Sodexo into this market. On the flip side, Centerplate is a boutique sports and leisure provider with a platinum-grade client portfolio in North America, but we’re competing against companies with much greater scale. The acquisition enables us to be much more competitive in the market and also to be a better partner to our current clients by leveraging all Sodexo has to offer to support them. So, from a broad market perspective, it’s a great marriage.
Kwittken: What does the new-ish marketing organization look like?
Pascal: Within Sports & Leisure North America, we have combined the two organizations. Sodexo has a strong B2C focus in sports and leisure. We have been able to leverage that consumer marketing arm with our clients on the B2B side, since Centerplate has the broader market presence, established client relationships and deeper market understanding in North America. So again, it’s been very complementary.
Kwittken: I imagine with Sodexo’s ownership there are plans not just to help grow in North America, but to expand globally. Can you tell us about those plans, if any?
Pascal: We look at sports and leisure globally, so the plan is to take the intellectual capital within Centerplate and apply that to other geographies, as an engine of growth for the company. When Centerplate moved first to the United Kingdom, and then to Spain, we took learnings from North America and translated them appropriately into Europe. That has been very successful and we will continue this execution supported by the scale of Sodexo.
Kwittken: Shifting gears here, you actually introduced me to the concept of FOMO. We talked about how to get people out of their living rooms and off their phones and how the brand leaned into FOMO to raise excitement about experiencing live events. Some have called this time “the golden age of being at home.” How do you keep people coming back to the game? What’s the strategy from a marketing standpoint?
Pascal: If I take a step back, when you think about large-scale events, historically our business model was to offer the same single experience at the same time, presented in the same way, to all attendees. That’s completely counter to the way people are experiencing entertainment today – and it’s not just entertainment, it’s education, career, everything.
We recognized that we had to introduce this concept of choice. Choice more tactically, for instance with our menu offerings, and also strategically, in the sense of “choose your own adventure.” That means a family can enter the same venue and experience a live event differently than, say, colleagues at a corporate outing or a group of young adults. This required getting a much deeper understanding of who is coming to the venue and how they are spending their time there. We partnered with our clients to understand who their guests are today and how that’s changing moving forward. Then on a planning side: are there any underlying changes in the business, such as a stadium rebuild on the horizon?
The need to draw people to experience live events puts even more pressure on the “outside the lines” entertainment that Centerplate provides. Once we had the deeper understanding of our clients’ plans and their audiences, it felt like a traditional branding exercise of understanding what’s important to these people, creating offerings against those, and sub-segmenting not only the audience but the building itself so that any fan can have multiple experiences in their journey. We flipped from being a transaction-based company to an experience-based company. We used to spend all of our time talking about efficiency metrics, and we now have to overlay those with engagement metrics. That was a change in philosophical approach, and then we had to retool everything under that to enable us to deliver authentic experiences versus transactions.
Kwittken: Can you talk about leaning into food culture and local cuisines as part of the experience?
Pascal: At a game, people want to celebrate their hometown. Or, if someone’s visiting a convention center or an airport, they want to have the true flavor of the destination. It’s the same end-desire, which is to have that authentic local experience. At Centerplate, we think of ourselves as the “anti-cookie cutter” in how we strive to offer unique cuisines across the spectrum of venues we serve. It’s not solely about operational efficiency for us. We can’t have the same experience in every building for every guest because that wouldn’t provide a local, authentic experience, and it wouldn’t add sufficient value to the guest journey.
The question becomes, for example, how do we authentically capture the best jambalaya in New Orleans? It’s not good enough to have jambalaya on the menu. It has to be really good, authentic jambalaya. We partner Centerplate chefs and experience design teams with local chefs from each venue or stadium. Typically, it is a celebrated chef, not necessarily a celebrity chef – someone who’s still working in the kitchen and tied in a real way to the community. We get to know their local suppliers, so we ensure we’re buying the right rice and the right shrimp for that jambalaya. The chefs also help us refine the recipe and check on quality assurance. Ultimately, we want to make sure that if the only meal you have in New Orleans is at the New Orleans Convention Center, you’re getting the true flavor of the city and not just a Centerplate interpretation of it.
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