NCAA Basketball Marketing: What we can learn from #6 Seed Notre Dame

It's time to shift back to college basketball, full time.

I'm going to pick up my breakdowns of this year's NCAA Tournament field, from a marketing point of view. We're in search of inspiration- things that all of us can take and apply into our worlds. From the NBA Digital Disciple Series we just completed, I'm going to apply a "Plus One" method to make each inspiring thing even better.

Can you hang with me?

Let's rejoin our coverage of the South Region. When we broke camp, we had looked at top seeded Duke, #2 Villanova, #3 Baylor, #4 Purdue, and #5 Texas A&M.

Let's go.

South Region #6 Seed Notre Dame

What's Inspiring about Notre Dame Athletics Marketing? (Link here)

We've broken down the Irish marketing efforts previously, here. Today I'll call out 3 inspirational things that Notre Dame does.

1. Coach Brey's Photo Stream

I'm a fan of the move to have CoachBrey.com, a new addition since the our last visit to the site (check it out here). Although it doesn't contain a lot of information yet, it does give us something with crazy potential... In the bottom right hand corner, you'll notice the Flickr icon, which takes you here.


Clicking in here takes you to Coach Brey's photostream. It is ironic that the first stream of pictures are all of the cheer squad (I'm sure his players would appreciate that!) But if you scroll down a bit, you do get into action shots of this year's squad.

Plus One: What if these pictures were only pictures uploaded by Coach Brey from his mobile device? It could become an inside access look into the Irish program. Coach Brey sees things that none of us get access to and I think it could become a serious spot to get the latest vibe on the team.

2. A DEEP athletics blog

Notre Dame offers two of the most critical components to having a successful blog. First, it's elevated and easy to get to. As you'll see below, the Blogs are pumped directly into the Men's Basketball page. While I wish this would be only men's basketball posts here, you can gather the potential in one quick glance.

But the Irish don't stop here. So, if you click here or look below, you'll find that ND has one of the deepest blogs I've come across yet. In fact it's almost overwhelming the quantity of information now at our fingertips.

Plus One: With all of this information and a great foundation, it becomes even more valuable to structure it so it's easier to consume. I'd love to see ND do two things: Separate things out by sport and add some visuals! That way we could have a deep and personal connection with our sport!

3. Coach Kelly miked up?

What? A football post here? Well, in a word, yes. Notre Dame took football coach Brian Kelly and miked him up for their Spring Practices and then aired it online. Just click in here or look below and you'll get a glimpse into the approach. You definitely feel closer to the program by hearing something normally reserved for players and assistant coaches. It's pretty powerful stuff, and I believe it could be applied to Hoops...

Plus One: The film & video crew at Notre Dame helped drive this experience with Coach Kelly. They are up on Twitter, here. And I believe they have the talent and creativity to help expand this to hoops. How could we apply what's worked well with Coach Kelly and apply it to basketball? I'd love to see all the coaches get miked up for a practice. Yes, that means the assistants and Coach Brey. Why? It's not about simply taking football and applying it to basketball. It's about what makes hoops unique -- and that includes all of the one-on-one attention or position (bigs vs. guards) attention that comes packed into every basketball practice. This could become a powerful statement on how the Irish develop talent.

That's it.

What's next? We'll be back Wednesday with a breakdown of #7 seed Richmond. As always, you can keep in touch via Twitter. I'm @pawlow34.

Andy