Branding National Sports Teams: How Do They Rank?
November 23, 2007 by Susan Gunelius
Filed under Marketing
Eighteen months ago, market research firm Turnkey Sports and Entertainment began a project to analyze the brands of professional sports teams using the following methodology according to SportsBusinessJournal.com:
“In late May and early June, Turnkey polled about 12,000 adult sports fans in the 47 North American markets that are home to a team in the NFL, NBA, NHL or Major League Baseball, surveying at least 200 and as many as 500 fans in each market, depending on the number of teams in each town. They asked 20 questions relevant to each team’s brand: 14 meant to measure popularity and six meant to measure loyalty. They also asked fans to assign a letter grade, A through F, to each team’s owners. They blended those results to create the top-line number that they’re calling the Turnkey Team Brand Index, which endeavors to rank the strength of each of 122 team brands in its respective market.”
The results might surprise you.
The Pittsburgh Steelers ranked number one based on the Turnkey Team Brand Index due to their local market dominance. Teams that you may have expected to rank near the top of the list that have a strong brand presence nationally like the Dallas Cowboys and the New York Yankees ranked 28th and 29th, respectively.
What do you think of the professional sports team brand results? I’m not sure I’m sold on the process of ranking national sports teams based on their local brand identities. I can certainly see the importance of having a strong brand image and message in the local market in which the team resides, but it seems to me that national sports teams should have a strong national brand image and message as well. Perhaps this research should have been two-fold measuring the local brand index and the national brand index to get a more complete understanding of the power and effectiveness of each team’s brand. What do you think?
Click the link for more information on the Turnkey Team Brand Index report.
I call BS on this one — any poll that doesn’t have the Yankees on the top is phony. Considering you can buy a bootleg Yankees cap on the streets of Marakesh, their global brand dominance is not to be questioned. Which other sports franchise has comic book and tv characters wearing their logo. In fact, the Yankees uniform has all but become the generic attire for baseball, and their cap is the Vanilla of American casual headgear. With the exception of perhaps Manchester United during David Beckham, there is no widelier-known team in the world.
But yes, fans in Pittsburgh are fanatical. As they are in Philly, Cleveland, Chicago, and everywhere in between.