Here’s a sneak peek at our Jan. 31 issue.
Be honest. You love hockey again. You hated the lockout and raged at the league and the union and swore you’d never watch this half-baked season to show how hurt you were. But a game or two in, you’re loving it. After all, you’re a fan. Hockey’s back, and it’s sweet.
There is no question that the lockout did some serious damage to the NHL brand in the minds of fans and sponsors alike.
Fans have been robbed of half a season, sponsors have been robbed of major event activations like the Winter Classic and All-Star Game, and everyone is wondering just how uncomfortable negotiations will be when the league comes to renew contracts with the likes of Molson, Kraft and Scotiabank. In December, Level5 Strategy Group released a report saying the NHL brand was suffering from more negative associations than BP after its 2010 oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.
Granted, we’re emerging from a dark time for Canada’s favourite game, but isn’t that a little extreme? The NHL in worse shape than BP? Really?
The Level5 research is accurate insofar as what it actually measured: consumer sentiment at the height of the lockout crisis. It divided its more than 1,000 respondents into three groups: the “passionate,” “neutral” and “non-passionate.” All three groups held overwhelmingly negative views of the league dominated by terms such as “bored,” “dissatisfied” and “unhappy.”
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Sponsorship experts acknowledge the NHL is a brand in trouble, but seem to be dismissing the BP comparison.
“I kind of discounted it,” said one sponsorship expert speaking off the record. “You’ve got to take that research with a grain of salt.” In the middle of a strike, everyone will say they’re pissed off, our expert reasoned.
What the study numbers don’t show is the fact that sport fans – unlike a product’s Facebook “fans” – are passionate, which makes them fickle and prone to extremes. Ever see someone swear off a team after a playoff elimination? That’s where the Level5 findings are coming from.
Granted, there is lots of evidence to suggest fans are willing to rebel; even a casual scan of Twitter reveals several calls to boycott the truncated season. But Brian Cooper, president of S&E Sponsorship Group, believes good hockey will bring back even the angriest fans.
“The funny thing about sports is that passion overrides rationale,” he says. If a team roars into the new season on a winning streak, those fans will return, says Cooper.
None of this is to say that everything will return to status quo without significant outreach. Die-hards may need their fix no matter what, but the league has been trying to grow its audience among those “neutrals” and “non-passionates.” That work now rests squarely on the players shoulders.
“The league needs to step back at this point,” says Cooper. “This has been a protracted, public, acrimonious fight between the league and the players… But the real partnership with the consumers is with the teams and the players. There is no emotional attachment to the NHL shield. It’s more local than that. The teams will be in the forefront and players should do outreach.”
Healthy audiences will do much to balm the bruises in sponsors’ accounts. What’s more, forgone sponsorship activation opportunities have likely been at least partly offset with pro-rated refunds, according to those familiar with such contracts.
True, Molson has undoubtedly seen volume sales drop with no hockey to draw drinkers to arenas, bars and neighbourhood gatherings, but this would have been the case even if they weren’t a sponsor.
Other sponsors may prove more of a challenge though. Partners like Kraft and Bridgestone lost big events they’d built full-scale programs around. According to Jo-Ann McArthur, a member of the Sponsorship Marketing Council of Canada and chief strategist at Toronto firm fisheye corporation, the league’s position is precarious on two fronts: with so much money now shunted to other hockey opportunities (local activations with junior hockey, for example), those sponsors may continue down that path.
Moreover, the number crunchers at each of those companies will be busy looking at sales during the lockout. If they don’t see a substantial decline, they may re-evaluate how they value NHL sponsorship.
“You don’t want a sponsor to learn what it’s like to live without you,” says McArthur.
Beyond all this, it’s worth remembering that this is not the first lockout the NHL’s executive has had to recover from in recent memory. The players have to make amends with fans, but it’s up to the league to make nice with sponsors. And they’ve had practice. Since the 2004-2005 work stoppage, the league has grown its business by $1.1 billion, “and that had nothing to do with the players,” Cooper says, of the league’s wooing of sponsors. “No one’s skating faster or getting more breakaways. The NHL are smart marketers when it comes to sponsorship.”
