At the beginning of January 2011, certain cartoon superheroes began to emerge over the internet; each representing NHL hockey teams. At first I (and many others I’m sure) brushed these aside and ignored them. But they kept coming. For each day of January, the NHL announced a new superhero with the name of an NHL team and shared with us their background story and their super powers. About midway through the month I finally looked into it and found out that these were designed my famous Marvel comic book creator Stan Lee (creator of Spiderman, the X-Men, the Hulk, and many others) in a new partnership with the NHL leading up to a show put on at one of the intermissions at the NHL All-Star Game which took place on Sunday, January 30th.
At first I thought “What is the NHL thinking?” with these corny characters and I really couldn’t understand what they were trying to accomplish with this. I thought it was just a desperate (and ineffective) gimmick to try to win over some old comic book collectors from the US and, from talking to others and reading what people had to say online, I was clearly not alone.
However, from my Introductory Marketing course, I was recently able to link the concept of “consumer life-time value” to discover what the league’s marketing strategy is. They are trying to market to children, hoping to create the next generation of hockey fans with these superheroes. Consistent with Value-Based Marketing, hey are hoping they can get young fans to become new purchasers of tickets and merchandise, then regular purchasers, then loyal supporters, and hopefully advocates.
We’ll have to wait and see what kind of effect of the “Guardian Project” really has; but for now, I’ll swallow my pride and admit that it may not be as dumb as I thought. That is, now that I have learned the principles of a marketing strategy in the Value-Based Era.