For any South African marketer, it’s important to understand the relevance of major sports rugby, cricket, and soccer, to consumers. What is really interesting from a media approach is that fans of each sport are different and a one-size-fits-all approach won’t cut it with campaigns around sport.

We take an objective look at South Africa’s second most popular spectator sport – rugby.

Firstly, it’s interesting that 45% of urban adults support the Springboks and 16% have actually attended a decent amount of the games.
There is a 60/40 split between men and woman supporters and, within the group, 60% also support Currie Cup teams and 52% support South African Super Rugby teams.

There is a large group of active rugby players too. 600,000 urban adults (excludes school children) have played a game in the last 12 months and the average age of participation is fairly high at 36 years old.

There is a huge crossover between rugby and cricket (90% of cricket supporters and rugby supporters) but there is less of a cross over from soccer where only 48% of soccer supporters support the rugby.

Their media habits are different too. Mobile phones are 21% more likley to be considered an important medium for communication amongst rugby supporters – and this figure rises higher even for western province supporters to 48%.
29% of adults, all over South Africa, have watched a special rugby broadcast on TV. Rugby supporters are 3% more interested in reading about rugby in newspapers (45%) versus magazines (42%).

Rugby supporters are 19% more likely than most to research topics using the internet.

And, by far, the most listened to radio station by Springbok supporters is Metro FM.