Even the greatest clubs in the World can play to empty stadiums if they are not marketed or sold the right way to the public. One perfect example of the magic of marketing are the Seattle Sounders. Their fans can tell you day in and day out that they have been following the team since before the USL-Pro days, but the truth of the matter is, the majority of them are lying. The Sounders used to play in front of a couple of thousand people on a good day before joining Major League Soccer. However, as soon as they joined MLS, they were playing in front of tens of thousands and became the team to be imitated off the field. This did not happen by circumstance and was a planned phenomenon. Before the Sounders made the leap to MLS, the club spent thousands of dollars in guerrilla marketing. They hung scarves throughout the city, and planted a simple question into the minds of the public, who are the Sounders? In blunt terms, they marketed themselves as a major league team with history before they even played a single game. This was done with such a great amount of success, that their inaugural season saw average attendance of over 30,000 fans per game. For comparison, the league average that year was closer to 16,000.
On the other side of the spectrum, Chivas USA was the perfect example of a marketing campaign gone bad. The team fought tooth and nail to market itself as two things, an alternative the LA Galaxy, and a club that the Hispanic population should follow. This only caused the team to be labeled as second-tier. They were not seen as a club competing to be on the same level as the Galaxy in their market.
When it came to battling for the Hispanic population, it was competing against every single team in Latin America that had already won the hearts of that population. Many of these fans already had a team to follow in Mexico, El Salvador, Argentina, or elsewhere, and in soccer it is often times seen as sacrilegious to follow two teams. Yet again, Chivas USA was seen as second-tier club by a certain constituency. Even the name itself, “Chivas USA”, labeled it as a spin-off of an already existing team from Mexico, Chivas de Guadalajara. It should come as no surprise that it became the first MLS team of the 2000’s to fold.
Now, you may be asking yourself, how does this affect the Houston Dynamo? Well, the simple answer is that these lessons in marketing should be something every team should keep in mind. Marketing is about to become a huge part of the Houston Dynamo. The club recently hired Amber Cox as the Vice President and Chief Marketing Officer. The Vice President title is something set aside for a different article. The chief marketing officer part of the title is more important to this discussion. Amber Cox will have the distinct honor of being the chief marketing officer for not only the Houston Dynamo but also the Houston Dash.
For those of you that may not know, the Dash are the National Women’s Soccer League team that is run by the Houston Dynamo. They both play at BBVA Compass Stadium and train at Houston Sports Park. This is important because Cox will not only have to think of marketing strategies for a single portion of the soccer population in Houston but for two of them. Both teams are facing different issues at the moment.
When it comes to the Dynamo, Cox will have to capitalize on one of the best off-seasons the team has ever recorded. The Houston Dynamo not only made one of the biggest signing in the league by obtaining Erick “Cubo” Torres, but may have finally gotten a player that is capable of reaching the Hispanic population that may have in the past been hesitant in attending Dynamo games. The team has also revamped their coaching staff by getting rid of Dominic Kinnear, the coach they have had since the founding of the club in 2006, and replacing him with Owen Coyle. Coyle has coached multiple teams in the English Premier League, and coaching at such a high level has surrounded him with a buzz before he even partakes in a single training. Cox will have to capitalize on these earthshattering moves while also worrying about finding a channel to broadcast Houston Dynamo games.
Cox may be the right person at the just the right time. During her tenure with the Phoenix Mercury of the WNBA, she was an important part of team obtaining a jersey sponsorship. This made the team the first in the history of the WNBA to secure such sponsorship. If she can work some of that magic to secure a television home for the Dynamo, and one that actually brings revenue to the club, then her tenure will quickly be on the road to be labeled a success.
On the other side of the spectrum there lies the Houston Dash. The Dash also had an amazing off-season, but sadly due to the way the team has been marketed, the amount of people that have noticed has been quite small. While the Houston Dynamo have averaged home attendance of around 19,000 per game. The Houston Dash, in the same stadium and being run by the same owners, have averaged a less impressive 4,600. While this number is impressive and enough for second best in the NWSL, the fact that the team is using the same facilities and marketing team as a club that’s averaging 19,000 makes it less than stellar.
Sadly, getting these numbers more in line with Dynamo figures is going to be an uphill battle. That is due to in large part with the stigma that women’s sports holds in the United States. Women sports are often times seen as imitations of their male counterparts. There’s a reason why the NBA can fill arenas while the WNBA has teams folding every other season. This is where our heroine Amber Cox comes into play. Cox has previous experience when it comes to marketing a women’s team, and she did it by removing the stigma present within the game itself.
The Phoenis marketing strategy involved getting rid of underlying sexism within the fan base by marketing the team as just another basketball team, instead of a women’s basketball team. Cox ran a marketing campaign that ran the tagline, “Basketball is Basketball”. She forced people into the realization that if they followed men’s basketball, then following women’s basketball is still following the same exact sport. This was met with some success since the average attendance for the Phoenix Mercury has stayed above the average for the league itself. If Amber Cox can run a similar campaign using soccer in Houston, then with some luck, some of those 19,000 fans that attend Dynamo games may start attending Dash games. Since in the end soccer is soccer.
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