The De-Evolution Of A Net
The New Jersey Nets are just about as sorry of a team as the New York Knicks. What does that mean you may ask? - Terrible, awful, dreadful, shitty, worthless, and last but not least, desperate. An article surfaced today of the Nets new promotion to help sell ticket packages for the upcoming season.
Their solution, is something that I would never - And I mean NEVER - think a franchise would approve. It can quite possibly be the most pathetic attempt to round up “fans” that I’ve ever heard of. But, enough of me building up the angst, here we go…
The New Jersey Nets have decided that any fans who purchase a 10-game package will receive five reversible jerseys. On one side, you have either LeBron’s Cavalier jersey, Kobe’s Laker jersey, Chris Paul’s Hornets jersey, Kevin Garnett’s Celtic jersey or lastly Dwayne Wade’s Heat jersey and on the other side you get some awful Nets player. Now let that soak in a little. That’s right, the Nets are offering reversible uniforms with their players on one side and an actual talented player’s home jersey on the other. So with KG you get Yi Jianlian, with Kobe you get a throwback Stephon Marbury and with Lebron, you are lucky enough to receive a Jarvis Hayes on the flip-side.
So the Nets are actually asking their fans to take a Nets jersey with the much more saught after replica’s of some of the top players in the league - facinating stuff, No?
As if this wasn’t a hard enough self-slap in the face for the Nets franchise, they are adding a bonus of a one month subscription of the New York Post. So there you have it; the most embarrising attempt to sell packages in sports history, congratulations Nets - you really know how to create some distance between you and your compitition.
I think this a great initiative. The Nets might have been the first franchise to market their opponents as a means of selling tickets in the Spoelstra era. It is good to see that teams are getting a little more creative in down economic times.
Dude this is nothing. FC Dallas gave out Drew Carey glasses when the Sounders played here. At least the Nets are trying to promote their team a little. FC Dallas just promotes part owners of other teams.
I get that sometimes you have to be creative, but I think the biggest problem with any of these kinds of promotion is how do you ensure a long term investment from these ticket buyers. getting contact info and a list of names to follow up for next season is great but you still have to go after them every single year. The challenge is that when you do this, the buy in is for one time. After that you have to start all over again and be even more creative since the sale was leveraged against the promotion and not the value of actually holding the tickets.
Its not like they are promoting another sport, some fans want to cheer for other players and other teams so its not that bad an idea to get interest. What would make it a good promo is guaranteeing that you can get these people to invest for 2-3years or more. If not well…..you have to come up with another creative promo that raises the bar on the last, eventually you will plateau and then your stuck. As good as my sales staff were, they faced the challenge of getting people who are inspired by these promotions to renew or upgrade each year when they were more influenced by the promo. The strategy cant just be, well we have the info and the right to follow up at any point. Peoples purchasing nature changes for many reasons, especially this past year with the economy tanking, you have to take into account this variable as we all know the market never stays the same and the longer they decide to stay away the harder it is to bring them back. Which means you have to ask, how can I hold on to them for a longer term once I get them interested.