Building brand equity for the NHL -- and stars such as the Sedins -- through a more balanced schedule

The one-two punch that is the Sedin twins is one of the greatest assets of the Vancouver Canucks Hockey Club as they prepare for the 2010 Stanley Cup playoffs and market for the future.

If it's true they've been undervalued in their own backyard of Vancouver until very recently, it's also true they've been even less appreciated elsewhere in the NHL, with 17 franchises in the eastern time zone and a heavily-unbalanced regular season schedule.

And that's largely because you can't fully understand what you never -- or rarely -- see.

It explains in part why even seasoned hockey media types from throughout the NHL and its 26 designated television markets (DMAs) don't seem to have cracked the code on just how terrific they are. The league is already the only one among the five big leagues in North America that is so largely skewed towards New York and Toronto with a majority of its teams in the Eastern Time Zone.

The geographic concentration of the NHL and its superstars is exacerbated by its schedule, one which does not allow for fans of each club to see the other 29 teams at least once. Seventy-eight per cent of regular season play is intra-conference and almost 30 per cent intra-divisional.

When I first raised the issue in the editorial pages of The Vancouver Sun and Sports Business Journal in the fall of 2006, the situation was even worse, with 87% of each team's 82-game regular season being played within its own conference and a whopping 39% within the division. That travel-saving, cost-reducing, highly-unbalanced format -- supposedly designed to promote regional rivalries -- was what the NHL took out of the lockout to say "Thank You Fans".

http://www.thesportmarket.biz/columns/2006/nov1306.htm

What it did was prevent fans in Vancouver from seeing emerging superstars such as Sidney Crosby of the Pittsburgh Penguins and Alex Ovechkin of the Washington Capitals at least once each season. Instead, divisonal rotations meant we'd see #87 and #8 once every three years.

The NHL did slightly tweak its schedule three seasons ago, deploying a wildcard tool that at least allowed the Canucks to play host to Canada's three eastern teams -- the Montreal Canadiens, Ottawa Senators and Toronto Maple Leafs -- once each year.

Yet we still need to wait three years between visits from the marquee player brands and marquee team brands of the eastern conference. It's just not good enough for a league that is still a gate-driven business and relies on its season ticket holders for the vast majority of its revenues.

The flip side of this is that the Sedins and other top talents from the western conference are largely "site unseen" in the majority of eastern markets each year. The media and hence the fans rarely have the chance to see them play.

It's only part of the story, but the sooner the NHL's unbalanced schedule is replaced by a more balanced schedule -- i.e. like that of the NBA, which also has 30 teams and plays an 82-game regular season but limits intra-conference play to 63% -- the better. Annual visits (and the resultant television exposure, media coverage and fan impressions) will help build the personal brands of individual players like the Sedins, the team brands of all the teams in the league and, ultimately by extension, the brand of the NHL.

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The Public Relations strokes of Tiger Woods: On course, but still in the rough

The thinking here that, ultimately, the most important part of the business of sport is the business of winning will be put to the test in the case of golf icon Tiger Woods.

His twinned agenda -- the first being his pursuit of the Golden Bear and 18 majors and the second his attempts to repatriate a public image badly-tarnished since the night of November 27th, 2009 -- will be dominant storylines in the golf industry throughout 2010 and into 2011.

It's clear to me that he'll do much better on the field of play -- especially on Tiger-friendly golf courses such as Augusta, Pebble Beach and St. Andrews -- than he has fared off of it in recent months.

We'll never see Tiger in exactly the same way given the events and lurid revelations which were unleashed by the bizarre automobile accident at his home last fall. But winning will go a long way, as it has with other similarly-disgraced professional athletes and sports icons in the past.

Whether it's enough in itself -- for either Tiger or his various publics -- only time will tell. What's clear is that any of us expecting a complete reinvention of Tiger Woods as a media-centered, fan-friendly professional golfer are, as veteran columnist Cam Cole wrote in today's edition of The Vancouver Sun, "dreaming in technicolour".

http://www.vancouversun.com/sports/Cagey+Tiger+Woods+plays+questions/2713561/story.html

In my books, the handling of the media and PR firestorm surrounding the car accident itself and the resulting stories around his private life ranks among the worst-ever in professional sport, at least for an athlete of Woods's profile, especially given the massive resources and infrastructure he has at his disposal.

Doing nothing but a few short written statements on http://www.tigerwoods.com/ in the first three months was a mistake, especially as many of his corporate sponsors squirmed in the unwelcome attention his actions had caused.

Then doing nothing more than a highly-controlled, overly-staged media conference February 12th was another mistake, at least in that it was done in isolation from any other public communications and in that it contained now ridiculous-sounding vagueries like "not ruling out a return to golf this year" less than a month before the plan to return to Augusta was put in motion.

What we do is one thing. How we handle what we do -- especially our mistakes -- is another. The latter is often as important as the former in rebuilding public trust and connectivity. That's why the questionable approach taken by Tiger Woods, Inc. on all of this has been unfathomable to me in terms of public relations and personal brand management.

Yet by beginning to make himself available for interviews such as those delivered by Tom Rinaldi of ESPN and Kelly Tilghman of the Golf Channel Sunday evening, Tiger Woods is now at least back on the course of proper public relations. How and when he's doing it remains suspect -- in my view, he's still in the rough in terms of "getting it" -- but at least he's taking the basic steps that are part of the territory of being a professional in general and a professional athlete in particular.

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Vancouver 2010's greatest gift: the lesson of inspiring by overcoming adversity

Event management is a case study in multi-tasking. Event management for an international competition -- particularly at the level of the Olympic Winter Games -- is the most complex beast of all. There are many things event organizers can control....and many they cannot.

Weather conditions cannot be controlled. How event organizers react to it can be.

That's why the greatest gift that VANOC, the Vancouver Organizing Committee for the Olympic and Paralympic Winter Games, gave the city of Vancouver, the province of British Columbia and all of Canada is how they responded to a rough start to Vancouver 2010.

It is a case study in pursuing excellence even in the face of adversity.

After four days marred by logistical problems exacerbated by the weather, mechanical failures and the tragic death of Nodar Kumaritashvilli, the Games could have slid the slippery slope of continued problems and spiraled into disaster. Failure can become defeat if individuals, teams or entire organizing committees comprised of thousands of people, stop trying in the face of mistakes, criticism or plain bad luck.

Instead, the leadership of VANOC, its management and volunteers made the adjustments needed to turn Vancouver 2010 into one of the best Winter Games in history.

To rally from the tough opening weekend of Vancouver 2010, the people behind VANOC did not have to look far for inspiration.

They needed only to witness the courage of the Georgian Olympic team which walked into the Opening Ceremonies February 12th, only hours after the training run death of their teammate Kumaritashvilli. Their body language did not hide their heavy hearts. It only reflected the sadness shared by all.

They needed only to look at Slovenian cross-country skier Petra Majdic, who picked herself up from several broken ribs suffered in a training run to win a bronze medal for her country.

They needed only to see Joannie Rochette's steely determination to persevere in the days after the death of her mother. Persevere she did, in bronze.

Jeff Lee of The Vancouver Sun (http://www.vancouversun.com/) said it best when he wrote today that the true spirit of Olympism is the ability to overcome and to inspire.

The teammates of Kumaritashvilli did. So did Majdic and Rochette. So did countless other athletes who battled adversity at lesser but still challenging levels, bouncing back from falls, injuries and poor first runs to come from behind to win Olympic gold.

Those individual case studies of the power of the human spirit to overcome adversity and inspire serve as a fitting metaphor for how VANOC responded to the obstacles of event management to deliver an excellent Vancouver 2010 Olympic Winter Games.

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