Wednesday, March 22, 2006

A marketer with its own team

How would you like to own a sports franchise and name it after your brand? Say hello to the New York Red Bulls (nee Metrostars) of Major League Soccer. They just bought the franchise for $100 million (I didn't say it was cheap) and announced the renaming (they bought naming rights to the stadium too).

Although this sounds peculiar to American ears, it's common in soccer. Red Bull owns a team in Austria, and I have a jersey for Cruz Azul -- a popular Mexican soccer team named for the cement company that owns it. Closer to home, NASCAR has been known to display a logo or two.

This will almost certainly get other marketers thinking:
It is enough to make some companies salivate at the advertising opportunities. "Any company that does significant sports marketing and sponsorship has to be looking at this very closely," said Tim Westerbeck, a branding expert and the managing director and principal at Lipman Hearne in Chicago.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Aguante Cruz Azul!
Cruz Azul is still a team payed by the workers of the cementera, begans like a team of workers in the amateurs division until they get to the 1rst division, so since the team was growing the workers change the name of the city were they work for "Ciudad Cruz Azul". Is not a company like any other, is a cooperativa with no propietor, so the team is called like that because all the fans love the company and the city, even that now there are millions of fans that no work there. Adios, saludos.

Bob Houk said...

I don't no why I became a Cruz Azul fan -- probably just because I see them more often than any other team on the games shown on our Spanish-language TV stations.

Thanks for giving us the background on the team -- I didn't know the company was a cooperative.