Ball State
Overview
Ball State’s tradition of innovation and entrepreneurship is rooted in the late 19th century, when Muncie business leaders envisioned a local college to help boost the city’s development. Ball State University’s mission is to be a national model of excellence for challenging, learner-centered academic communities that advance knowledge and improve economic vitality and quality of life.
Understanding the Challenges
Members of the Ball State Athletics management team did not have a high-level online store to support fans, alumni, parents, and students of Ball State University. Additionally, Ball State needed a solution to support their game day event sales for merchandise.
Setting New Objectives
The Ball State Athletics Marketing Staff set out to find a vendor that could provide a broad selection of merchandise for alumni, parents, fans, and students of Ball State University Athletics. The team also was determined to gain tighter control of branded logos used in the market to develop consistent name recognition for the athletics program at Ball State. Another goal was to develop a solution for the onsite game day events held by Ball State Athletics that helped make better merchandise available at games and increased revenues to the Athletics department.
The Advanced-Online Solution
After visiting the Advanced-Online facility, Advanced-Online was selected by Ball State Athletics to build an online store for all market channels needed with an eye on brand control, revenue enhancement, product quality, and customer service representative of the University.
Advanced-Online took responsibility for building a product line that now stands at over 800 products including personalized jerseys, broad choices for alumni apparel, and the largest selection of branded merchandise for Ball State Athletics in the country.
Ball State was instrumental in helping Advanced-Online develop their current College Game Day/Event solution that is now offered to all college clients. Advanced-Online set up a separate online portal for Ball State and now other college clients to purchase products for events or internal use at wholesale pricing. This program included developing merchandise tags for products branded with the website banner to drive onsite customers to the online store. The program also included flyers to hand out in branded merchandise bags pushing the online program.
To view their store and products, visit BallStateGear.com.
