A friend of mine tweeted just the other day about brand loyalty and how everything she was currently wearing was from Nike. And this got the little marketing geek in me thinking...what brands am I loyal to? Of course brands I like come to mind but in many cases I'm not particularly loyal to them. I love Apple, but my phone is not an iPhone. Sperry Top-Sider makes a great shoe, but I only own two pairs and usually wear flip-flops in the summer. L.L. Bean has the best return policy in the books and I love my backpacks but my boots are Sperry Top-Siders. And then I began wondering... well there must be something in my life that I'm loyal to outside of my friends and family, so of course the Red Sox came to mind.
Duh, the Red Sox are a brand just as much as the Yankees, the Rays, the Angels, and even the Pirates, or the Bruins (shout out the the Eastern Conference Champs), the Saints, the Patriots, the Lakers, Manchester United, and Team USA. They're all brands. They're all being marketed and sold to us, in many cases even more cleverly than anything Apple and Google can do. We view things like Apple and Google as products, something at least semi-tangible that we have to physically use or purchase, but not a sports team. A sports team is an experience. We don't go out looking to buy a baseball game, we just want a relaxing evening at home. But every single team is a brand all it's own.
The thing about a sports team being a brand however is sometimes no matter how great a commercial, logo, website, or promotion night is, it won't matter. People want to see winning teams and in many cases if its not a winning team they just don't care. No matter how much we hate it bandwagoners and fair-weather fans, they are the ones that end up filling stadiums and buying t-shirts that sell the brand. But these pesky fans only show up when there's a winning team in town. Branding a team must work seamlessly with putting together a winning team.
A living breathing example right now in my native New England are the Boston Bruins. Back a few seasons ago when the team couldn't even find their way into the playoffs they were the last team on the minds of most New Englanders, but now that they are stringing together wins and have played their way to the Stanley Cup Finals I'm seeing Bruins Facebook statuses from people who have never seemed to care and old dusty hats and t-shirts being dug out of closets. All of a sudden people are running to their local Olympia Sports and Dicks Sporting Goods. The Bruins are the cool brand right now, just like the Sox in '04 and '07 and the Patriots for much of the early 2000's.
There are so many tools to work with when selling and marketing a team, you have the players, the personalities, the history, the great moments, the venues, and the experience/sport in general. When it comes down to it if your team has a decent GM and some talent you have all the ingredients for success on the field/court/ice and in the world of competing markets and brands.
I know I have bought into everything about the Red Sox brand. I own roughly 30 Sox shirts and jerseys. I sleep in pajamas printed with the logo with blankets and a pillow that match. My pens and pencils at school have the little Sox pattern all over them, declaring my love for the team many times over. And that's only scratching the surface, I could keep going and I know for a fact that there are certainly fans who are even more die-hard than me. So I'm thinking that's where my brand loyalty lies, with the Boston Red Sox. It's a little crazy how something that we call a pastime turns into a brand and somewhere in the middle there is a very blurred line separating the two.
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