Almost every part of a fan’s experience at a professional sports event—from the time they enter the parking lot until long after they’ve returned home—is designed to optimize their emotional connection to the sport. As part of a team that specializes in sports sponsorships at Keurig Dr Pepper, experience design and management (ExDM) alum McKade Peterson carefully considers the factors that maximize sports fans’ experiences around the globe.
“My love, my passion, has always been sports,” Peterson says. When other children had imaginary friends, Peterson had an imaginary coach ordering him to practice. As a teenager, football was his number one passion. But while Peterson had the heart to play in the NFL, he most often found himself guarding the water bottles for his high school football team.
This didn’t dampen his drive to be a part of professional sports; when it came time for him to decide on a course of study, he wanted to pursue a degree that would facilitate a career in sports entertainment. As a student at BYU, he learned that the ExDM program was the only major at the time to offer classes in sports management. “That was how I made my decision,” he says. “It was the closest thing that was available for me to be able to pursue my sports entertainment passion.”
Peterson graduated from the ExDM program in 2019 after completing internships with the Utah Jazz and the Larry H. Miller Tour of Utah, a road cycling race generating millions of dollars in economic impact. Although he had only taken a few classes directly related to his chosen industry, Peterson found that having a more thorough understanding of experience design gave him a unique edge as he applied for work in the sports industry.
“There was nobody else applying for those sports jobs that understood the experience as a whole—from start to finish—better than I did. I was really able to use that as my differentiator,” he explains. “While other people may have received a more formal sports education, I could tell what the fan was going to be looking for holistically, not just for the sport itself.”
His first full-time job in the sports entertainment industry was in sponsorship sales. Although he was not confident in his sales technique and skills, Peterson found success in quickly identifying and solving business problems. Following his sales work, Peterson continued his education with an MBA in sports entertainment management from the University of North Texas G. Brint Ryan College of Business.
Those years of focused training inform his work on the sponsorship team at Keurig Dr Pepper, but when he’s designing solutions, he also consistently refers back to the foundational principles he learned in the ExDM program.
For example, when the new chief marketing officer (CMO) at Keurig Dr Pepper talked about approaching their marketing strategies with a design-centered mindset, Peterson was the only person on his team to have heard of the principle. “I was able to come in and be like, ‘Hey, I’m actually a resident expert on that. I literally majored in that particular topic,’” he says.
And when the CMO talked about how he wants to capitalize on “peak moments”—the most positive moments in which consumers interact with a brand—Peterson could return to his ExDM notes and readings on the topic from five or six years before to provide insights for his team.
As associate manager of sponsorships, Peterson identifies ways that Keurig Dr Pepper can maximize sales consumption of more than 125 beverage brands through sports sponsorships. He’s currently working on a program with the Dallas Cowboys to give a fan the chance to do their fantasy football draft in the “war room” where the Cowboys do their own drafting.
“My favorite part is that I get to work with some of the coolest brands in the world,” Peterson comments. “There’s so much passion behind the brands that I get to work on—almost everyone has interacted with a Keurig Dr Pepper product at one point in time.” Even his three-year-old daughter enjoys a company brand when she drinks a Mott’s apple juice with her lunch. “I think that’s one of the coolest parts,” he says: The magic happens far beyond the scoreboard.
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Written by Kathryn Cragun
