SportsArena

Sports Arena
It's an old market that may be new to your clients

by Carrie Severson

PICTURE IT. Your client's logo is on the back of 1,000 foam fingers or plastic electric rods being waved around in the bleachers of a stadium. The game is being televised nationally and three different companies call you the next week wondering how they can have their name on the flying sticks behind the backboard. Better yet, your client receives calls from potential customers who caught a glimpse of their name while attending the game. It's a win-win situation.

Who says your clients have to be a recognized sports sponsor in order to enter the sports market? Just because you sell to real estate firms and technology companies doesn't mean you shouldn't bring them promotional ideas using sport products or an idea for a program wrapped around a specific sporting event.

The sports industry is a growing one, and with the trends studied in classes like those taught by James Santomier Jr., Ph.D, anyone can gain a better understanding of how to reach consumers of all ages.

Santomier is the instructor of an online Sport Marketing course through Sacred Heart University.

Sport products fit well into all aspects of society. Santomier teaches his class that sport consumers are exposed to sports at a young age because their parents are wrapped up in sport pools and conversations either through their participation or from attending games. Children then are socialized into following the same path.

The course looks at how public relations, marketing and promotions relate to the sports industry. It also teaches students interested in becoming involved in this area how to market sports as a product and about the marketing of non-sport products using sports as promotional tools.

In our industry, distributors should look at how to use both non-sport related items, as well as the available sport products offered by various suppliers in order to help your client reach a broader audience.

"The intelligent sport marketing person will look at a company and ask where are the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats," Santomier says. "Then do an analysis and see what the company can do to improve on the areas you've found."

Dan Rupoli's company, Nordan Group Inc., produces replica helmets for most of the major sports that involve headwear. His football, hockey and baseball helmets are becoming more popular as sports coverage grows.

Rupoli says they take the shell that protects the head and decorate it with custom corporate logos. The metal face cage of a football helmet is replaced with neon tubing, giving it a much brighter impact point. Then the company will take various corporations that have affiliations with sports and design the helmet with specific colors.

He says distributors will stand in their booths at shows and say, "Well, I just can't see an application for my clients; I deal with software companies."

Rupoli says once he starts to discuss with distributors different ideas and campaigns that could work for their clients, a lot of them walk away with a much more open attitude.

"Distributors underestimate the amount their customers spend in advertising in sports or representing themselves as a sports-related company. If you look at the racing cars or around a track, there is quite a bit of diversity of core companies that are trying to use the event as a medium for advertising."

Check for yourself. Next time you are at a game, make a list of the corporations that are spending money trying to get their name in front of the buying public.

How do you get involved in this market, you ask?

Take it from a much smaller scale first. Take a peek at the lobbies of your current clients. Do they have plaques hanging on the walls promoting their involvement of the local Little League team or soccer club? Go to parent companies of your clients or big corporations and check out what they have done in the different sport venues.

You'll start to identify companies who have taken the time and spent the money--and if they haven't, their competitor has, which of course is your biggest selling point.

Now you're a pro. You know how to go about looking for companies that are already interested in marketing their business through sports and sport products. Now the question is, what products to offer?

What product to suggest to your client often has to do with the time of year. If it's back-to-school time, you may want to push your customer to support a local high school, college or professional football team--perhaps using a football as a giveaway.

Matthew Cohn, vice president of Mac Specialties Ltd., says the foam footballs the company specializes in counts for 60 percent of the company's ad specialty sales. From the end of summer (also the beginning of school and start of the football season) through the middle of November, sales are strong. As people start to think of the playoffs and Super Bowl, sales pick up again for the product.

Cohn says significant orders come through for the item from companies who sponsor bowl games, and the same happens around March Madness for the basketball-related items.

Siding with Rupoli, Cohn emphasizes the importance for distributors to remember that though your client may not be a tobacco or beverage company (typically noted as sport sponsors), your client can still be a sport sponsor. For example, Cohn says they have done foam footballs for UPS and a company that makes headstones for funerals, as well as bail bondsman.

"Everyone wants to be young and healthy and doing (a promotion) with sports-related items helps companies project that kind of image," Cohn says.

Who knows more about being healthy than food companies? Shannon Lownes with Corporate Team Players has supplied sublimated apparel to several different food companies.

She says these types of companies have different departments and they do a lot of team building. When a team-building event is on the rise, Lownes gets called because hosting a sport event allows each department in the company to have a different look.

Of course food companies aren't the only businesses taking advantage of the sublimation process of Corporate Team Players. She says the sublimation process is where the sporting world is moving to because the image lasts longer. Lownes rattles off a list consisting of companies like Goodyear, American Airlines and the University of Wisconsin Madison.

"When something new happens in the sport world, we get called," she says. "The new women's soccer league, for example--we've already made shirts for the big sponsors as well as shirts for the new national lacrosse team's press conference."

Being fit and hip are two angles to try, using the foam footballs and basketballs or leather soccer and volleyballs available by numerous suppliers. If that doesn't grab their attention, try the safety angle using replica helmets and other such protective wear, as well as whistles.

Ron Foxcroft and his two sons, Steve and Dave, are behind the company Fox 40, which is the seller of a pea-less whistle. As all three of the men were involved in sports as officials, they initially brought the whistle with harmonically tuned air chambers into the market for other referees.

"We thought we would solve the problem for officials, but then we slowly grew and grew and then saw the different applications we didn't realize before," says Steve, the executive vice president for Fox 40.

Officials in the NBA, NFL and Olympic games, as well as lifeguards and nurses, have used the Fox 40 whistle.

"This is a great way to partner up with companies and a great way for companies to be seen through sports. The major events are great tools for companies to use to promote themselves," Steve says.

Major events are something Craton Promotional Products knows well. The company has a promotional products division, a fulfillment and distribution division, an event division, a licensing division and an interactive division. The event division was added to Craton when its largest client, Chick-Fil-A, became the title sponsor of the Peach Bowl.

Charles Craton, chairman and CEO of the company, explains when Chick-Fil-A decided to marry with the Peach Bowl, the Peach Bowl then had ownership of the new logo Craton was asked to help with.

After discovering the new business world of event merchandising, Craton created a whole new corporation called Craton Event Merchandising Inc., which is a subsidiary of the holding company of Craton Promotional Products, Excellence in Advertising, Inc.

Since its creation two years ago, Craton Event Merchandising has become the largest provider of collegiate bowl merchandise in the United States. The company is working on managing its eighth college bowl game. Along with the college bowl games, Craton also does the Texas-Oklahoma football game every year and the Georgia-Florida game.

The company is now the official merchandising company for the entire American Le Mans Series and the European Le Mans Series.

Every event has a title sponsor--like the FedEx Orange Bowl-- and then underneath that is a whole new group of lower-level sponsors with corporate involvement, Craton explains.

"More and more major corporations in our culture today are finding out that the best way to reach the consumer is co-branding. Leveraging is a huge growth potential and we are all over it like grease on a skillet."

Any way you look at it, sport products are an arena that distributors should be playing in.