First Stadiums, Now Teams Take a Corporate Identity
By JULIE BOSMAN
SPORTS fans have long been accustomed to stadiums and arenas taking on corporate brand names. Consider Busch Stadium, where the St. Louis Cardinals play, the Washington Redskins's FedEx Field and, of course, the home of the Houston Astros, known briefly as Enron Field.
But the recent purchase of a Major League Soccer team by the energy drink company Red Bull has taken naming rights a step further. This month, the soccer team formerly known as the MetroStars converted to the New York Red Bulls.
It is a name change that some marketers hope will open a new front in the commercialization of professional sports. Red Bull, which is based in Austria, paid the Anschutz Entertainment Group more than $100 million this month for the rights to the MetroStars club, a share of a planned stadium and the stadium's naming rights.
The team immediately acquired the Red Bull name, and at the opening game on April 2, players will don jerseys bearing the Red Bull logo.
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.
While a corporate-named team is not unprecedented, some other teams that have tried it have faded out of sight. The 1920 Decatur Staleys of football, named after a corn products company, eventually became the Chicago Bears.
Playing off its nickname in advertising campaigns, Coors in 1993 introduced the Colorado Silver Bullets, a women's baseball team that played in the men's minor leagues.
There are success stories, too. The founder of the Green Bay Packers, Curly Lambeau, received $500 from his employer, the Indian Packing Company, to purchase uniforms and equipment. In exchange, the team was named after its sponsor.
In Europe, the practice is more widespread. Red Bull owns a soccer team in Salzburg, and several teams in Germany and the Netherlands are named for their corporate parents.
But there are also potential pitfalls for marketers: What if the brand, or the team, goes south?
"The risk is, What happens to the team when a product starts selling badly?" said Allen Adamson, managing director of Landor Associates, the brand and corporate identity agency that is part of the Young & Rubicam Brands division of the WPP Group. "It is a very risky strategy. Especially when you choose something that's both an energy drink and an alcoholic mixer."
The obvious danger of the direct association is that the company cannot easily disassociate from the team, or vice versa, Mr. Westerbeck said.
"The team really goes out and becomes a brand ambassador for the product," he said, adding that while naming rights on stadiums are often changed, it would be more difficult to alter a team name. "The name, of course, can be changed again, but right now it's like a tattoo."
Alexi Lalas, the president and general manager of Red Bull New York, said the relationship between the Red Bull team and the Red Bull brand is not as close as it might appear. "There is a separation between the team and the product," he said. "We have a responsibility to first and foremost sell the soccer team, and our product is this soccer team."
That said, "we also acknowledge that we're part of the Red Bull family," Mr. Lalas said.
He noted that for some sports, like Nascar, fans hardly blink at marketing messages blanketing equipment, players and venues. But the opposite is true for sports like baseball. In 2004, a "Spider-Man 2" promotion that would have placed ads on bases was shut within 24 hours after Major League Baseball heard from angry purists.
Some soccer fans have registered their disdain for the Red Bull name. "The righteous indignation that people have about what this represents and the direction that this signifies is at times understandable, but also, I think, at times it's laughable," Mr. Lalas said. "This is not unprecedented in our country or in the world."
But the relative youth of soccer in the United States makes it an ideal sport to introduce the idea of naming a team after a corporate parent, said Dean Bonham, the chairman and chief executive of the Bonham Group, a sports and entertainment marketing firm.
"I think that the connection with Red Bull and the sport of soccer is a great connection," Mr. Bonham said. "The demographic is perfect."
But Mr. Bonham predicted that it would probably be decades before the practice catches on in the United States.
"Can you imagine the New York Rangers being called the ABC Rangers?" he asked. "It's just not in the cards."
And many company names simply do not translate into appropriate team names, said Mr. Adamson of Landor.
"No one's going to want to see the Coca-Cola Cowboys or the Kraft Singles," he said.
