In: Operations Management
The marketing strategy of corporate naming rights for sports venues is a fairly recent strategy in the sports business landscape. Imagine you are on the marketing team for a minor league team that will be moving to your city. You have been tasked with generating revenue for the team through the sale of stadium naming rights. Based upon what you learned from the Topic Materials, compose a one-paragraph pitch to persuade a local company that naming rights are worth the hefty price tag. Post your pitch to the Main Forum. Provide your peers with constructive feedback about ways to improve their pitch.
Acquiring and selling naming rights for sports venues is the in-thing now in sports business. Having naming rights to a venue results in enhanced visibility for the company. Whenever the venue gets good media attention or becomes popular for some reason or the other, the name of the company also gets highlighted. The company’s name, advertisements, logo, mascot (if any) and others displayed in the property get noticed by the visitors and also by spectators (national and/or international) watching matches or events at that place through their televisions or Internet.
Access to naming rights also enables a company to get valuable data (for analytics purpose) about the fans visiting the venue and also chances to interact with them physically at the venue. Moreover, naming rights help a company’s brand to ‘break through the clutter’. Moreover, naming rights help the company in the form of strong recollection of its name and its brand in people’s minds.
Due to all these reasons big companies such as Mercedes Benz, U.S. Bank, JP Morgan Chase and others are spending millions and often billions of dollars to purchase naming rights to important existing stadiums and upcoming ones. Further, these deals are often of a long-term duration of 20-25 years and ensure constant revenue to the company selling the naming rights.
Hence, the local company can buy the naming rights from us (we being a minor league team) at a reasonable price (in thousands of dollars) and later sell them to a big company in millions or even billions thus earning huge profits. Also there will be quite a number of willing buyers to purchase the naming rights at high prices.