Beware: New Marketing Experiments In the NBA

by mattro
Raptorial

Expansion of the NBA has proven a bust.

Talent wise, the league has become watered down. Apparently in this world, there is a finite number of basketball players who can compete at the NBA level. Unfortunately for the league, this number is far LOWER than the total available NBA roster spots. The margin, it seems, is about 2 to 1... Expansion leaves half the league playing with a purpose (to make it to the playoffs) and the other half collecting paychecks and looking forward to their next day off. Teams that can afford the great players sellout the majority of their games. They are 'the rich' of the league. The remaining clubs sell out a small portion of their games, usually only when a team with a star is visiting. These teams are 'the poor'... waiting for trickle down economics, trickle down talent, to occur. One could compare it to a class struggle, but that seems ridiculous when even the NBA bench players and injured reserve guys earn $247,000 a year.

This year, some exhibition AND regular season games are being played in Europe and Japan where sellout crowds pack the venues to see NBA teams play each other.

Before the regular season started, the Seattle Sonics and the Indiana Pacers played against each other in Germany and traveled to Spain as well. European NBA fans packed the auditoriums. Kids clamored for autographs. Since the first Dream Team drew international attention to the league in 1992, pre-season games in foreign countries have become the norm for the NBA
But this year when the New Jersey Nets faced off against the Orlando Magic in Tokyo, Japan, it was a regular season game. 40,000 Japanese people showed up to watch. The same match up hosted by New Jersey or the city of Orlando would NEVER have sold out this early in the season. Even if it did, neither of the team's facilities hold 40,000 people.

Do you hear the ringing of the cash register bells? They're going off right now in the minds of every NBA executive and team owner in the United States and Canada: "Hey! If I can draw this many people simply by moving the game to a city foreign to the NBA, well hell! The merchandising revenues alone would make up for the team travel expense." The execs are slobberin' like Pavlov's best friend. If a team owner can sellout EVERY GAME in this manner, what's to stop him?

The 'home team' era of professional sports may be coming to an end in favor of a more Big Time wrestling-style approach. This type of product packaging, where the spectacle moves from city to city like a circus (moving from one waiting market to the next), could prove very accommodating to the NBA. The logistics and expenses of moving small teams around would prove less of a headache for basketball teams than it would for football or baseball clubs... each have much larger rosters and coaching staffs.

This type of new-style marketing scenario fits in perfectly with the corporate 'downsizing' mentality that is currently sweeping our nation. 'Maximize profit no matter what the cost' is the corporate mantra nowadays. As a result, thousands of people lose their jobs, despite the record profits being posted by the company that fired them.

Should the NBA ever forsake the home town phenomenon for an international road-show marketing strategy, the crowds who once felt they had their 'own team' would be effectively downsized in favor of greener pastures and the more frequent ring of cash register bells.

And if we're lucky, the greedy team owners will let us pay $29.95 per game to watch 'our' teams traveling the world on Pay-Per-View.