Cliff Clinton - July 23rd, 2020

Guest Contributor, Marketing and Branding at kubisusa.com

In December of 2017, the potential NHL franchise in Seattle was officially an undertaking, the moment the Seattle City Council passed a 7-1 vote that confirmed that, yes, there was a chance the NHL would be coming to the Emerald City after decades of close calls and failed attempts. Seattle’s sports fans were well acclimated with the torturous process of hope; getting council permission, getting an arena, and then figuring out whether they would need to convince a team to leave it’s home to migrate to Washington (a little more than ten years after the SuperSonics did the same to them), or would they try to create something of their own?

Seattle’s decades of patience were rewarded when in October 2018, they were awarded an expansion franchise. It was ultimately a speedy process, given the fact that it can take years, not months, to even find your city a seat at the franchise table. It helped that the NHL was actively looking and didn’t need convincing to expand, and having powerful owners (like founding partner of TPG Capital David Bonderman and legendary Hollywood producer Jerry Bruckheimer) and a ravenous fan base (25,000 season ticket deposits in the first seventy-five minutes of their first-ever sales drive) certainly didn’t hurt.

It also gave the franchise two months to set up, with only two elements firmly set in stone: they were now the new team in Seattle, and they were going to start playing in the fall of 2020. Otherwise, they were free to proceed with getting their team together the best way they saw fit.  

Across the country, around the same time as Seattle’s newest NHL franchises was likely wrapping up defining their franchise, Washington’s NFL franchise, twelve years shy of their 100-year anniversary as a professional organization, received a call that would alter theirs. Stadium sponsor and shipping giant FedEx was calling for the franchise to remove the “Redskins” moniker from their name, following a letter from an investor group worth $620 billion urged the company to put forward the effort. Suddenly, less than a month before training camp was set to open, Dan Snyder and his team were mandated to change their name, something that would prove only to be July’s second biggest headache.

Of course, it was still a headache all the same. In pre-COVID times, August marks the time that fans flood back to the stadium, ready to purchase apparel and re-up season tickets with pictures of the logo on each and every item, so the timing relative to the offseason couldn’t have been worse.

Despite the two franchises having absolutely no connection whatsoever (unless you want to point to Washington city and Washington state I guess), they used July 23 to announce to the world who they would be for the foreseeable future: the Seattle Kraken hockey team, and the Washington…. Football Team.

Twitter was merciless. It all came down to a seemingly obvious question: why the hell did the new kid on the block announce themselves via an incredible hype video, while the storied football franchise put up the equivalent of an “Under Construction” sign and stock photos that seemed to feature a goal instead of a goalpost.

The answer ultimately comes down to branding, and more importantly, how long it takes to run it through the proper channels. While sports franchises around the country play host to some of the best marketing teams in the world, they often don’t have somebody in-house that knows how to build a brand. This is normally a specialist agency, one that has the proper experience in the full brand suite. And my goodness, is the brand suite full.

Start with the brand definition: what does the brand have to deal with competitively, and where do they stack up versus their competition? Is it where they want to stack up, or is the conception that a franchise makeover may help the company re-define it’s place in the landscape of other sports teams? How does the brand talk and communicate? What are the brand values?

It may sound silly and tedious to an outsider looking in, but these are questions companies face all the time. Do we want our brand to be cool, tough, regal, blue-collar, or appeal to children? Are we the laughing stock of our industry and we’re hoping a new name and executive team can help us get the much-needed lift we all need to survive or are we tweaking what we feel to be an already strong market presence?

Companies ask themselves these questions all the time, and while major companies like Pepsi or Mastercard spend a lot of money for results that may not even register to their audience, you’re involving a lot of people in a conversation about the core concepts of the brand. Who is our market (and who do we want our market to be), what do we feel like we can do better, and what is a value we want to make sure that we are focused on for the next decade are conversations that require a lot of thought? For many of these companies, they also require a lot of people to discuss, agree, and sign off on. Everyone from the Vice Presidents of nearly every department, to the owners, to the investors, to any board of directors that you may have, and that doesn’t even include getting reactions from fans on what they prefer.

Once all these facets of the brand are mapped out, and everyone in the room agrees on the sort of look they are going for, then the teams have to go create everything in line with the brand. The new name, the new logo, the color palette, the alternate color palette, and how signage, jerseys, and merchandise will look in line with all of the above (remember, Washington needs a home, away, alternate, color rush, and throwback jersey for everything from the field to video games). This also goes through multiple phases, with multiple disagreements and changes and power struggles of their own that have nothing to do with the branding team, before a decision is finally made on each and everything above, then and only then can the brand be unveiled. Basically, there’s a reason they can only ever get 9 out of 10 dentists to agree on gum, instead of all ten.

The Seattle Kraken’s appropriately took the nearly two years to figure this out amongst themselves, and fans were rewarded with a very cool announcement video, a team name they could get excited about, and merchandise they wanted to buy. We aren’t talking when the season starts either; fans wanted this stuff the day of, and for good reason. The team rewarded a loyal fanbase with a strong, mythical team name and logo that paid tribute to the city’s seaside location and the Pacific Northwest in general that also looked badass on hockey gear. Why wait, I want to be a fan now.

Washington has a similar undertaking. No matter if Dan Snyder is at the head of that table, a brand new group of people will be evaluating the team in this very same way, and if they simply spit out a logo and name really quick that wasn’t properly evaluated, they would simply be squandering an opportunity to get it right and breathe new life into the team. Most companies at the end of the day would rather avoid the costs that come with branding, but they also understand that sticking with the exact same logo for a hundred years or rushing through the process can mean you have a confusing name, blasé logo, or uninspired customer base. It’s something that Washington’s football team simply can’t risk, while Washington’s hockey team is well on their way to a memorable season before a single player has even been signed.