The city of Bradenton, Fla., is less than an hour down Interstate 75 from Amalie Arena, where the National Hockey League’s Tampa Bay Lightning play their home games. The Lightning are currently tied 1-1 with the Pittsburgh Penguins in a best-of-seven Eastern Conference Finals series.
It’s not odd that the city of Bradenton should try to capitalize on the moment and their vicinity to Tampa Bay by doing something like having rally towels made and selling them. You would expect those towels to bear graphics or language supporting the Lightning, however. In this case, your expectation would be incorrect.
In what was supposed to be a clever marketing ploy, the Bradenton Area Convention and Visitors’ Bureau sponsored a gold towel with the words “Let’s Go Pens!” featured prominently, with the bureau’s web site and the names of other nearby tourist destinations also featured. The towels were distributed at last Friday’s Game 1 of the Eastern Conference Finals, played at the Consol Energy Center, the home of the Penguins.
As a marketing scheme, the idea had merit. Pittsburgh residents were already familiar with the Bradenton area, as Major League Baseball’s Pittsburgh Pirates have made Bradenton their Spring Training home since 1969. The bureau was already a sponsorship partner of the Pirates, Penguins and Lightning. According to Gary Rotstein of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, it was the Penguins who approached the bureau with the sponsorship opportunity.
Bureau executive director Elliott Falcione is a native Pittsburghian, and used his familiarity with the city’s denizens to put something that he knew they would keep in their hands. In theory, all recipients of the towel would have the city of Bradenton on their mind every time they looked at the towel for years to come.
Falcione said marketing for the city in the Pittsburgh area so far has paid off. He claims that tourism to the area by Pittsburgh residents is up 37 percent, with annual estimates from the bureau reaching 21,000 tourists from Pittsburgh.
From the public relations angle, the idea was a born loser, however. It was highly unlikely that Bradenton’s sponsoring of enemy regalia would go unnoticed, especially after this tweet hit the digital air space.
We’re gold rushing into the Eastern Conference Final! Shoutout to @VisitBradenton for the rally towels! pic.twitter.com/v34rUrlW4y
— Pittsburgh Penguins (@penguins) May 13, 2016
In making this move, the bureau broke one of the cardinal rules of marketing: you dance with the boy/girl who brought you. While it’s true that tourism from Pittsburgh residents may represent a great chunk of the revenue that makes Bradenton run, it’s the locals who pay taxes and spend their wages 365 days a year that are the real driving force behind the city. When you market yourself, don’t do anything to piss them off.
