Begininning with the letter "R"

Today’s word of the day is “Re-apply” and can de described: (1) to again request or solicit something. (2) to transfer something that has been successful and use it elsewhere.

For today’s entry (first of the next three), I am going to once again reference my parent’s recent trip to Florida and their attendance and observations at a Tampa Bay Lightning NHL Hockey game. With that I hope to compare some of this franchise’s marketing techniques to that of others sports and how or if our Canadian counter parts would and do use these methods to draw attendance. The main reason I chose the word reapply was because I think at the end of this we will all be able to draw a fairly informative conclusion on the success or failure in what some of this NHL expansion team is doing to market the sport of Hockey.

First let’s look at one of the marketing tools used by the Lightning that clearly is a re-apply from another sport, cheerleaders. That’s right cheerleaders. They have them and use them to as an apparent draw for increased attendance and I guess sport promotion. Both my parents found this not only surprising but somewhat demining to the sport itself. The NFL has been promoting its franchises cheerleaders beginning with the craze of the Dallas squad in the mid seventies right through to today’s teams. All teams have those good looking young ladies carrying pompoms and cheering on their team along the sidelines. Is this a marketing success for the NFL? Absolutely, because it has become part of the whole experience in the sport of football in the US and if they were not there it would be noticed. That’s all part of effective marketing. While the cheerleaders may not necessarily draw additional attendance just to see them adds to the whole marketing package.

So, can you take a successful marketing tool from one sport and re-apply it to another? In the case of cheerleaders on skates, my parents thought not. While there was whole mascot thing (Canadian teams have those as well) who ran around from section to section promoting people to “Make some Noise” and clearly entertaining young children, the Lightning Cheerleaders they felt were “just wrong” and did not belong in a sport played in a colder environment to which they were clearly underdressed. To add to this was the embarrassment (my mom thought but my step-dad didn’t seem to mind) of having a few come onto the ice and push a shovel around to assist the Zamboni in its ice cleaning duties. That would kind of be like the cheerleaders of an NFL team assisting the punt kicker by holding the ball?

There are many ways that marketing tools and Public Relation campaigns can be re-thought and re-applied to be used for other products. The use of animals and hit songs is an example. Recent TELUS, Dawn and the ever famous Super Bowl Budweiser commercials all use animals in brand recognition. Some memorable songs in recent commercials like AT & T’s “Come Together” by the Beatles, Buicks “Dream On” by Aerosmith and Chevrolets use of “Like a Rock” by Bob Seger, all have re-applied a common marketing tool and been successful. So has the re-application from the NFL to the NHL in respect to cheerleaders helped the over-all attendance in the case of the Tampa Bay Lightning?

The St. Pete’s Forum where the Lightning play out of for home games can seat approximately 19,500 fans. My parents figured there were approximately half that present, meaning a lot of empty sections. They also noted that there were not as much fan wear, meaning fans wearing hockey jerseys, waving those huge #1 foam hands or even fan slamming (this is when fans yell at their own team after a bad play). They found the whole experience uneventful. Would we use that word after attending a Leaf, Senators or Canadian game where fans are famous for turning on their own team at a game but defending them the next day at the water cooler?

The whole cheerleading thing is just a small example of a Hockey market in those NHL expansion teams that haven’t yet figured out what to do with what Bettman and the NHL have given them and in many cases do not seem to want. While the Tampa Bay Lightning may be desperately trying to take a marketing success from another sport and “re-apply” it to their own, they may have first wanted to solicit advice from some of the Canadian markets were the implementation of cheerleaders at a game would be a popular as Jim Balsillie seems to the NHL and Bettman right now.