Sports properties talk a lot about branding, but over the years, sales have always been paramount. The care and feeding of their brands has largely resided in the corporate sponsorship sales department, or added to the long list of duties of the properties’ president or league CEO.
Now that’s changing.
The NBA’s hire of branding expert Greg Economou as its senior vice president of marketing and communications caps a seven-month stretch in which four major properties filled marketing posts. The NFL hired Lisa Baird, former IBM vice president of worldwide integrated marketing communications, as its senior vice president of marketing, while the NHL tabbed Anheuser-Busch marketing veteran Mike LaBroad and NASCAR elevated former NFL sponsorship executive Steve Phelps to be their first CMOs, respectively.
“Leagues have understood for years that they are about building, protecting and promoting a brand,” said Octagon president and CEO Rick Dudley, one of a very few to have held senior posts at the NFL, NHL and MLB, “but too often, sports marketing ended up being sales instead of disciplined strategic marketing and branding.
“You’re seeing that change as these businesses grow more complex. From an organizational standpoint, identifying one person as the keeper of the brand is long overdue — and you’re seeing a little bit of keeping up with the Joneses here among the leagues.”
Leagues are realizing that they are not in the sports business as much as they are in the intellectual property business. Athletes are ephemeral; a strong brand is an enduring and bankable asset. As such, it needs care and feeding.
“Coming from a brand-centric perspective has supplanted marketing and sales in sports as the most powerful base from which to operate,” said Ed O’Hara, chairman of New York branding firm SME, where Economou worked for five years before starting his firm Brandthink.
With a fragmented and complex media market and a growing global business, a centralized marketing function and the coordination of resources is more vital than ever.
“When I was there, we certainly paid that lip service and knew all the buzz words, but the level of sophistication has grown exponentially,” said Phoenix Suns President Rick Welts, the NBA’s last chief marketing officer, who left the league in 1999. “To get the best talent out there in branding and marketing is now essential.”
Economou sees his appointment as only the beginning of a trend toward more disciplined marketing by leagues.
“If my only focus was to ensure consistency, that need is critical,” he said. “But when you talk about growing internationally and other pending challenges, we’re at a crossroads.
“We’ll not only see more CMO-types in sports, but the growth of real marketing departments, where you’ll see brand managers working on individual businesses, like at Procter & Gamble.”
