Rhys Jessop's Blog – Just another UBC Blogs site

Changing of the Seasons

There are two seasons in Canada: hockey season and waiting-for-hockey season. Maybe you heard, but hockey season in Vancouver didn’t end particularly well last year.

For most hockey markets, the end of last season was a little more muted. Especially in Phoenix, where the NHL-owned Coyotes were swept out of the first round of the playoffs by the experienced Detroit Red Wings, shortly before losing their franchise goalie Ilya Bryzgalov to Philadelphia in free agency. Needless to say, hockey tickets in Phoenix aren’t exactly selling like hotcakes.

That’s where the Fallon Marketing Agency comes in. Opening a new sports marketing division they call “the Room,” they have unveiled their new ad campaign for the ‘Yotes: “Hockey the Hard Way.” Here’s a quick peek:

While it’s a bold endeavor, positioning the team as a plucky group of underdogs rather than the tried-and-true method of selling the stars of the game, it’s about the only thing the Coyotes can honestly do. As Greg Wyshynski of Yahoo! Sports Puck Daddy hockey blog writes, “being honest with the Coyotes’ challenges is the hook; it’s how this team deals with that adversity that’s the selling point.” And seeing how this team with the NHL’s 29th highest payroll has somehow managed to make the playoffs and be very competitive for the last two seasons, it’s probably their only selling point.

The biggest problem that the Coyotes are going to face won’t be on the ice, but off of it. After a deal to sell the team to Chicago-based business man Matthew Hulsizer fell through, it left ownership of the team in the hands of the NHL, who are actively seeking to sell the team, possibly to a group that will relocate the team outside of Phoenix. How then can you reasonably ask a paying fan to care about a team that could move at any time? It doesn’t matter how good or bad any ad campaign is, Phoenix needs long term stability and certainty before it can start building a dedicated and sizable fan base.

“Hockey the Hard Way” intro on Coyotes website: http://coyotes.nhl.com/

Raising the Roof

In case you haven’t heard, there’s been a fairly significant construction project going on downtown. It’s already cost taxpayers in the neighborhood of $560 million, and it’s still leaking not a week before it makes it’s national television debut on TSN, hosting the surging B.C. Lions playing the Edmonton Eskimos in a key CFL West division match-up. Oh, it also looks like an upside-down pillbug.

Oh, about that television debut. According to Lions beat writer Lowell Ulrich, you’re not going to see it if you don’t buy tickets. That’s right, it’s a regional blackout. The Lions organization is considering canceling standard definition broadcasts of the big game in order to sell more tickets and fill up the 54,500 seat stadium. As it stands, 34,000 tickets have been sold.

But is this a good idea? Sure, simple economic principles dictate that restricting the supply of one thing (in this case, viewership of the game) will cause the customer’s willingness to pay to rise (for example, buying tickets and parking and food and beer and whatever else comes with the in-arena experience), but is this the best thing for the B.C. Lions brand? In professional sports, on-field or on-ice success is the main driver of customer value and loyalty, and as the Canucks have shown with a five-year season ticket waiting list, fans support winning teams. The Lions haven’t been doing an awful lot of winning in recent years, and attendance has suffered because of it. Also, the Lions are in the unfortunate situation of being in a hyper-competitive environment, directly occupied by the Canucks and Whitecaps and indirectly by many others (movies, T.V., clubs, etc.).

The bottom line is that blacking out a big game probably won’t have the desired effect on ticket sales. There are enough alternatives for the customer looking for entertainment to simply turn away if the game isn’t televised. Instead, just air the game and make a market offering to the casual fan. I mean, who wouldn’t be sold if they saw things like this: