Atlanta Hawks’s Chief Creative Officer Rewrites Marketing Playbook
“We had a systemic problem that simply changing our media mix, advertising creative, and taglines could not fix,” said Peter Sorckoff, the basketball team’s chief creative officer and EVP of brand and innovation.
Under new ownership and leadership, the Atlanta Hawks NBA has rebranded to score more points with its fans. For a peek inside the franchise’s marketing strategy, CMO.com met with Peter Sorckoff, chief creative officer and EVP of brand and innovation at the Atlanta Hawks. We were joined by his agency partner, Ted Wright, CEO of global word-of-mouth marketing agency Fizz.
Let’s go courtside to hear what Sorckoff and Wright had to say.
CMO.com: Peter, what has been your sports career path?
CMO.com: What macro trends are changing the sports entertainment business? What are the Hawks doing to address these changes?
Sorckoff: Mobile has been humongous—disruptive in positive ways and challenging in others. The positive is that it lets us get to the individual immediately to enhance their experience through their mobile device. It also helps us reach and stay in contact with increased frequency when fans are not in our stadiums or when they are watching on TV. The downside to some is that mobile devices distract from the live fan experience and take fans out of the game. I understand the concern but disagree that access to all of their social channels and the additional data can’t be additive.
CMO.com: How are insights from big data being used to change the game?
Sorckoff: For franchises, big data has helped team management forecast what an athlete’s impact may be. This has become crucial as management tries to mitigate the risk of contracts worth huge sums of money. Agents and players are using big data in similar ways to acknowledge past performance and demonstrate future statistical trends. These models can be the basis for future contract values.
From a branding standpoint, data helps us better understand our audience, their current behavior, and forecast for tomorrow. It further allows us to step back and look at ticket yield and how much elasticity we have in our product pricing.
We also use big data to determine what changes may be necessary to make our stadium more efficient and profitable. The longevity of stadiums has been cut almost in half from 25 to 15 years. This reduction has been accelerated by technology and the rapidly changing preferences of fans. For example, 10 years ago, no one was concerned with how much Wi-Fi bandwidth existed in a stadium. On the analog side, 15 years ago, a hot dog, beer, or soft drink was considered an acceptable offering. Today, that is not OK. People’s food and beverage preferences and personalized expectations in an experience era have been raised. These changes force stadium management to reallocate space and resources to meet these new high bars.
CMO.com: How are Millennials’ behaviors and desires versus older demos and corporate customers changing what the Hawks do?
CMO.com: Given all of these factors, when did the Atlanta Hawks realize they needed to make changes?
Sorckoff: Generally speaking, a lot of sports franchises are run very transactionally. Teams have a lot of seats to sell, so operationally you are focused on how to move big groups of tickets. The Hawks were no exception; we, too, were transactional in our relationship with our fans. Our fixation on finding the next sale had lead to a very real brand problem. By 2012, the Hawks had made the playoffs a number of years in a row; however, we weren’t seeing the pickup in ticket sales that would normally come with that level of success. The NBA as a league is great about sharing best practices, and we were using them all. Even winning games was not impacting ticket sales or fan sentiment like other teams had experienced.
It seemed that we had a systemic problem that simply changing our media mix, advertising creative, and taglines could not fix. I started looking for a fresh way to think about how we were going about our day-to-day business. It was around that time I heard Ted Wright at a conference speaking about the importance of managing relationships, finding influencers, and having a great story. The lightbulb came on. Sports is a constant source of stories, and fans are the ultimate consumers of a great story. I realized that the Hawks needed to rewrite its own story, and it would likely mean revisiting our core values and positioning.
Wright: Broadcast has been declining in its ability to move markets since the mid-1990s, and it hit a rock bottom point around 2010. So the Hawks had three problems. One, they assumed that broadcast was going to work like it used to. We also hypothesized that we could positively impact results by moving from inviting people to come into the Hawks to having the Hawks become part of the community. Metro Atlanta has very specific communities. We also believed that we should move from broadcast to conversation, and therefore the conversations had to be about people.
Second, there was a brand problem. We did an exercise by taking every NBA team’s billboard ads and stripping out the players, uniforms, and logos. You couldn’t tell which team it was. Teams were portraying themselves as commodities.
Third, the Hawks had negative legacy issues that many fans still remembered and held against the team, such as trading away iconic players over the years and treating these icons in a way that they would not want to be treated. From these insights, we realized that our fans were emotionally disconnected from the Hawks. There was nothing for fans to believe in anymore and what the Hawks were, and what our story was. … Stating the obvious, selling sports is emotional, not rational.
CMO.com: What was the disciplined “Religion Then Retail” process the Atlanta Hawks and Fizz used?
Wright: The first thing we did was listen to our fans by digging deep into the data from a conversation and sentiment resource we used, and analyzed 1.7 million offline and online conversations from Hawks and NBA social media, blogs, and forums, where superfans and people who care enough speak the truth. We wanted to truly understand them and start to build a relationship with our fans. When you are building a conversational word-of-mouth marketing plan, the science of this type of analysis informs the art of marketing.
Sorckoff: There was some initial organizational resistance to this approach. The insights challenged how we were presenting the Hawks brand and how we were going to market. What we learned was that we did not have an awareness issue. We had a relevance issue. People didn’t understand our messaging, didn’t care about the Hawks, didn’t trust the brand, and were emotionally disengaged. In an experience and attention-based economy, we were simply not resonating.
CMO.com: What were the next steps in the process?
Sorckoff: The insights from the research drove the new strategy, which focused on building relevance through emotional connectivity. We needed to give people a reason to believe in the Hawks by making the brand mean something to them. We brought the Hawks into the community and began conversations with fans and prospects versus broadcasting our messages to them. Our goal was to become an important community asset and to be in the center of bringing people together. We had to re-establish trust in order to encourage a belief in the “religion” of the Hawks—win minds and hearts before wallets.
We also narrowed our target audience to focus on a 30-year-old, multicultural Millennial or next-gen Atlantan. Atlanta is a young city, and we believed this was an underserved market. While doing so, our approach ensured that we didn’t alienate families or the B2B market. We then identified our values—what we stood for, which included diversity and inclusion. This lead to renaming the team the “Atlanta Hawks Basketball Club.” The name is meant to be inclusive, build emotion, and denote that everyone is welcome in this club. It also invites those who can’t get to a game to plug into the Hawks ecosystem. We also made sure that everyone in the organization understood our history and future story so that we could be consistent with how we presented the brand.
We worked with our players, the 15 most important Millennials in our organization, as we developed our visual identity. Together we created five NBA firsts. These included mix-and-match tops and bottoms, custom socks and laces, new colors to the league, asymmetrical design, and patterns. Including our players in the creative process allowed them to be authentic when answering questions from the media as they related to our new colors and uniforms.
We also collaborated with many of Atlanta’s prominent entertainers because of their influence with our new target audience. We wanted them to be part of the new Hawks story. Our new visual identity is at the intersection of fashion, entertainment, and sports. While gathering input from all of those stakeholders, our CEO told me, “If there isn’t a group of people who hate what you create, then you’ll know you didn’t push it far enough.” To break through the clutter, we needed to be visually polarizing and make the statement that something was different with the Hawks.
CMO.com: What is different about building sports versus other types of brands?
Wright: Sports brands allow people to live vicariously through the players doing things they themselves can’t do. You are selling pure emotion, and this is why it is so important to have conversations with fans. This is why sports is one of the last types of TV content that is appointment viewing. You want to be there when something happens.
Sorckoff: A well-positioned sports brand that finds its values and communicates them consistently makes it easier for fans to identify and then incorporate that team into the fabric of their personal identity. If you can’t understand what the brand stands for, or the brand is incongruent with what it says and does, people lose trust and interest. Because the sports business is so predicated on fans being emotionally involved, the loss of trust is crippling to avidity.
CMO.com: How have you used technology to build emotion and experience into the Hawks brand?
Sorckoff: Technology has brought the possibility of 24-hour connectivity—more stories with more depth and the ability to bring rich visuals. At the event, technology is a tool used to heighten the fan experience and a means for sharing that with your social sphere. We’ve used 3D video-mapping technology to overwhelm the sensory experience.
We also use technology to extend our conversations and elicit an emotional reaction. An example was our release of the 2016-17 schedule on Twitter with the sole use of emojis. The puzzle engaged and excited fans, created thousands of conversations, and went viral immediately, being picked up by ESPN and other sports media outlets. It was also on-brand and on-target.
CMO.com: So what is the Hawks versus Fans score?
Sorckoff: By creating a new story around the brand that is real and relevant to our audience and the city, we feel like the score is turning in our favor, which is always in the fans’ favor. We have seen significant growth in all of our key metrics and a lot more talk about the team.
CMO.com: What are the top marketing principles you strongly believe in that you think other CMOs should practice?
Sorckoff: In our business, we try not to lose sight that we are marketing to people. Data is a fantastic tool for insights, but in the end our product is a discretionary purchase. Logic is the enemy of an emotional buy.
I genuinely believe that creative without strategy is art. Art is extremely subjective, and subjective things are easily dismissed. Everything we do has a strategy behind it, informed by data.
Wright: Marketing has to be interesting, relevant, and authentic to the influencer so they will pick it up, learn about it, and inculcate it into the way that they talk to their people. If you do this in the age of conversation, your marketing will work. Fail on any of these, and your marketing will fail.