The Product s Role in Branding

The Product's Role in Branding

It's often easy to forget that those who work for your brand, ranging from retail clerks and office administrators to board members, are also representatives of it. In sports, it is often the case that prominent star players are as much a part of the product if not more as any league or team employee.

Johnson and Bird were the league's initial product managers and global messengers, serving as the NBA's ambassadors by consistently demonstrating on national TV just how exciting and entertaining the league could be.

As important as Magic's Lakers winning the five championships (1980, 1982, 1985, 1987, and 1988) and Bird's Celtics winning three (1981, 1984, and 1986) were during the decade, these incredible accomplishments were somehow overshadowed by a development that occurred during Stern's first full year as commissioner.

The Chicago Bulls selected North Carolina's Michael Jordan with the third pick in the 1984 draft (behind Sam Bowie and Hakeem Olajuwon). The red-sneaker-wearing, tongue-wagging, and frequently airborne Jordan initially supplemented, but then quickly surpassed, the achievements of Bird and Johnson. Collectively, these three enabled the NBA to emerge from the 1980s as "brand as icon," rivaling the extraordinary success of the NFL and MLB.

Not only don't "regular" businesses have a traditional (employee/ player) draft; some also lack the opportunity to always attract the smartest, most qualified candidates. Clearly this is not the case with the NBA, where all the world's best basketball players swarm to the league. However, in much the same way there are great products that fail because of any combination of factors including lack of foresight, inadequate distribution channels, and the inability to adapt to change, the NBA became the power it did because it successfully leveraged Jordan by providing the ideal platform for the league's greatest product.

For more than a decade, Michael Jordan was the NBA and the NBA was Michael Jordan. Whatever the reasons, he became interchangeable with the league as much a part of the brand as the omnipresent swoosh is to Nike. He also quickly came to transcend sports, entertainment, race, and big business, leading even sociologists to weigh in on the role of Jordan in American society.

Because of his unique ability to transcend sports, Jordan was able to assist the NBA in transforming itself into such a great global brand. To some, seeing Jordan wasn't about seeing basketball. Rather, it was about watching the personification of grace, beauty, and physical domination. In essence, Jordan's product attributes rivaled those associated with other great global brands.

Could there exist a better advocate for the NBA than Jordan? Stern, in his wildest dreams, could not have concocted a more universally appealing figure to assist in extending the NBA brand. Stern systematically established the NBA brand name while Jordan instantaneously extended it.

People who previously had a "take it or leave it" attitude about sports and basketball in particular were tuning in to watch games. They were showing up at arenas all over the country. In fact, thousands of once-apathetic fans showed up in droves, genuinely hoping to see Jordan shine even if it meant a loss for the home team.

Jordan demonstrated that great brands can transcend the actual product being marketed and attract a larger customer base in the process. In Jordan's case it wasn't about the game anymore, it was about the grace, the dunks, the beauty Jordan was as much an art form as he was an athlete.

Mention was made in Chapter 8 about how it can be detrimental if and when the messenger overshadows the product. In rare cases, like Jordan's relationship with the NBA, having a messenger who transcends the product in this case professional basketball can actually be beneficial, provided the messenger is also the product.

Seattle Supersonics owner Howard Schultz's company, Starbucks, presents a vivid business example of this branding experience.

To some, the ubiquitous coffee chain is their favorite destination but not necessarily because of its mocha frappuchinos or double lattes. Some Starbucks customers frequent the coffee chain because of its environment the comfortable chairs, the music (they sell their own collection of it), and at some locations, computers with high-speed Internet access. Thanks to this atmosphere, Starbucks became one of the interview rooms of choice for office-less dot-com executives interviewing future employees in the late 1990s. Students set up shop at Starbucks to study in much the way families visit McDonald's to bring their kids to the Playlands or PlayPlaces that adjoined thousands of the fast food restaurants nationwide.

Stern knew that the more he allowed Jordan the limelight, the better both he and the league looked. In essence, Stern continued to build the brand and increase revenue by simply yielding the floor to Jordan. As a savvy brand manager, Stern knew how and when to let the NBA's branding process evolve with the help of the world's most popular athlete.

From the time Jordan won NBA Rookie of the Year honors for the 1984 1985 season, until the end of the 1980s, overall NBA attendance rose nearly 50 percent and the Bulls became the NBA's most popular road team. In the Windy City, the Bulls alone sold out more games in an 18-month period from 1987 1988 than they had in their entire 22-year history. Simultaneously, the NBA's gross revenues nearly doubled to $300 million, in large part due to the game's explosive growth on network and cable TV.

When David Stern became commissioner in 1984, TV rights netted the league approximately $20 million annually. Due to the growing interest in the NBA from fans and advertisers, the networks began to shower the league with money. Five years later, NBC outbid longtime partner CBS by paying $150 million a year for the next four years.

In early 2002, the NBA negotiated its new TV contract, one that even in tough economic times, slightly surpassed its previous four-year, $2.64 billion deal by signing new TV partners, ESPN/ABC and AOL Time Warner to a six-year, $4.6 billion deal through the 2007-08 season. (For additional details on this strategic alliance, please see Chapter 6.)