Back in 2005, the Ultimate Fighting Championship, or UFC, looked like it might have to fold.
The mixed martial arts promotion had already had several big fights that did well on pay-per-view. And yet, financially, it was not successful enough as a business.
Fast forward to today.
Mixed martial arts has become a mainstream sport. UFC fights show on ESPN and sell millions of tickets on pay-per-view. And the company itself is worth multiple billions of dollars.
So what happened?
It’s a good question. And before I give you the answer, it’s worth thinking about what you yourself — as a marketer, or a business owner — might do in the situation that the UFC was in back in 2005.
Would you run ads on TV hyping up upcoming PPV fights?
Would you send direct mail to people who subscribe to martial arts magazines, telling them about the new sport and asking them to respond in some way?
Would you hire celebrities to come sit cageside?
In fact, none of these things were what the UFC did, or at least none were responsible for saving the UFC from ruin.
So what did happen?
Well, the owners of the UFC did a very smart thing.
They didn’t try to sell their core product at all.
Instead, they created another product, and they sold that.
Specifically, they created a reality TV show, called The Ultimate Fighter. It showed a bunch of guys, living together in a house, training and competing with each other for the right to get a six-figure contract for the regular UFC promotion.
And boy did it work. The Ultimate Fighter drew a lot of viewers, became profitable in itself, popularized mixed arts, and saved the UFC.
Because of all this, it offers a very valuable marketing lesson.
Off the top of my head, I can think of six separate marketing fundamentals that underlie this very clever move into reality TV.
But I won’t bore you by listing them here.
Instead, I just want to say that this kind of a funnel — coming up with a second, ancillary product to promote your core product — does not have to be limited to cage fights between two half-naked guys.
With a bit of thought, it can also work for many different offers and many different businesses.
For example, I’ve personally done this with a book I was selling once. And if you’d like to know the full story of how and what I did, you’ll be able to find the answer by going here: