| A foul ball may be recovered
in a big league name game
April 7, 2005
You don’t have to be a baseball fan
to have heard about the strategic play of the season within Major
League Baseball (along with the public’s spirited debate):
the Anaheim Angels are now the Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim.
Nostalgic bias, city politics and linguistic redundancies
aside, says Tom
Boyd, associate professor of marketing, both names
are the result of marketing tactics to draw in the coveted fans
and the dollars they spend to prove their allegiance to the franchise.
At one time, the team was the California Angels, but “when
Disney owned the team, they called it the Anaheim Angels as part
of a marketing strategy to bring people to the city and Disneyland,”
he says.
Boyd, a competitive swimmer and triathlete, came
to Cal State Fullerton in 2001. His research emphasis is on the
consumer behavior of sports fans, and he has been teaching sports
marketing classes and writing editorials about fan conduct for more
than 10 years. “Everyone involved in sports – including
advertisers, the teams and sponsors – are trying to get the
attention of the fans and their money,” he says. The Los Angeles
metro area has about 15 million people versus Orange County’s
3 million, he adds, so the team wants to make sure everyone in the
Southland considers it the home team.
“Actually, the timing for this change is pretty
good. The Angels have been doing well for a while,” and the
Dodgers’ recent record has been up and down, says Boyd, who
delights in the fact that the O.C. club papered nearly 500 billboards
that say simply, “City of Angels.”
“This is a good opportunity for the Angels
to get out there and compete for fans, and it’s been fun watching
the turf war take shape.”
| Q: |
How could the Angel organization have handled the
name change differently and avoided such an outcry from fans
and litigation from the city of Anaheim? |
| |
|
| A: |
I think that if they had gone to the public with more information
about how much money the team lost last year and how they were
working very hard to find solutions to the problem – without
raising prices for the fans – people might have been a
lot more receptive to the name change because it presented them
with a solution to that problem. But the Angels didn’t
do that; they just came out with the name change. |
|
| Q: |
What do you think the Angel’s
leadership learned from the controversy? |
| |
|
| A: |
I think it was a little insulting not to have treated their
fans as intelligent enough to understand why this was necessary.
The best lesson may be to treat your fans with respect and give
them some credit for being able to recognize the reasons for
having to do things. A lot of their problem came from a perception
of real arrogance and a lack of communication with their constituencies:
the city of Anaheim and the fan base in particular. |
|
| Q: |
The outcry from the fans seems to
have subsided. |
| |
|
| A: |
Very few of them were going to actually stop being Angels
fans; they were just peeved about it. I make myself listen to
sports-talk radio for “research,” and even they
were saying “Gee, quit whining Anaheim, the reason for
this is to keep from raising prices.” |
|
| Q: |
In fact, that’s one of your crusades: fans are
being priced out of attending pro sports games. |
| |
|
| A: |
After about a decade of prices going up, teams are now realizing
that they have to get kids into the stadium so that they become
the loyal fans of tomorrow. They may some day be the corporate
decision makers who will buy luxury boxes to entertain clients,
which is where teams make big money. If kids don’t learn
to love live basketball, football or baseball by sitting in
the cheap seats with their families, they’ll decide later
that snowboarding is the appropriate way to entertain a client. |
|
| Q: |
You now have about 120 former students who are working
in the sports marketing field, and it’s one of the hotter
areas in marketing right now. Does that mean you get a lot of
free tickets to games? |
| |
|
| A: |
Sometimes I get free tickets, but I’m more likely to
get free shoes because several of my former students have gone
to work for Nike, Adidas and Reebok. For a while there I had
more shoes than I knew what to do with. |
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