ST. LOUIS -- Blues fans will have to wait another year for the team to make a run at Lord Stanley's Cup, but their fans are being recognized for their loyalty to the Note.
Brand Keys, a New York-based brand and customer loyalty research consultancy, released its annual NHL Fan Loyalty Index Scores. You don't have to go too far down the list to find St. Louis Blues fans, who tied the San Jose Sharks with the fourth-highest score. The Blues were sixth in 2013.
The rival Chicago Blackhawks moved up from No. 2 to the No. 1 spot, jumping over the New York Rangers.
"Rule-of-thumb is that win-loss ratios can contribute up to a 20 percent bump in a team's loyalty. But to be fair to NHL fans, professional hockey is a little different from other major league sports," Robert Passikoff, Brand Keys founder and president, said in a press release. "Its contribution to loyalty is higher for the NHL, about 10 percent more, for a number of reasons: First, the sport moves faster than the others, so more attention is necessarily paid to the Pure Entertainment driver where wins and losses reside. For the NHL, the Authenticity driver correlates very highly to at-home attendance figures, and makes a slightly higher contribution to engagement and loyalty than for the NFL, MLB or NBA."
LET’S GO BLUES: Check out these photos of the fans, ice girls and others who support the St. Louis Blues all season long.
The four factors of fan loyalty, as noted by Brand Keys, are pure entertainment, authenticity, fan bonding, and history and tradition.
The Blues had a remarkable season in 2013-14. They went 52-23-7 with 111 points, which was good for second in the Western Conference's Central Division.
St. Louis ranked 18th in the NHL in attendance, with an average of 17,025 fans per game at Scottrade Center, or 88.9 percent of capacity. The Blues ranked 12th in road attendance, with an average of 17,445.
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