Beating the Bushes
Inspired marketing isn’t necessary to sell tickets to Major League Baseball games. Inspired scouting and coaching are. It’s easy to put fannies in the seats – in the words of baseball sage George Steinbrenner – if you’ve got a Ken Griffey, Jr. like the Seattle Mariners, or if you win 125 games and the World Series like Steinbrenner’s New York Yankees. But try getting your Double-A fans all pumped up for the playoffs when your 20-game winner gets yanked from the rotation to shore up the bullpen for the big club. Now that’s a business challenge. In baseball marketing, the bush leagues are the big leagues and, as honcho of the minors’ marketing consortium, Rod Meadows is the cleanup hitter.
Meadows started life as a broadcaster for Florida State University’s baseball team, but he developed a taste for sales and marketing when he created a college football radio report and sold it into some 350 stations in the South. He ended up with his own marketing firm and, in 1989, succumbed to a relapse of the radio bug and joined the Durham Bulls as marketing director and part-time broadcaster.
National recognition imparted by the Kevin Costner film Bull Durham helped the Bulls touch off the minor leagues’ merchandising renaissance. They proved that teams could sell more licensed gear and tickets hawking their own name – their own equity – than that of some distant major league team. Rare today is the minor league team that still goes by the name of its big-league affiliate.
“We don’t have marquee players. We have no control over what players we get. We have no rivalries like the Yankees and the Red Sox, so we better be doing a good job of entertainment,” says Meadows, whose official title is director of marketing for the National Association of Professional Baseball Leagues.
“Back in Durham,” says Meadows, “if we took a poll of the people leaving a game, 50 percent wouldn’t even know the final score.”
No, but minor league spectators sure as heck remember the Dynamite Lady who blew herself up at home plate, the Diamond Dig that had 10 fans rooting around the field for a 1-carat stone, or the Mayor kissing the pig. Those are all actual promotions employed by the Kane County Cougars, the Tucson Toros, and the Reading Phillies, respectively.
The minor-league penchant for promotion, for cheap, wholesome family fun, has begun to draw the notice of big-league marketers. That and the fact that last year the 170 teams belonging to the National Association drew 35 million fans. “More than the NHL and the NFL combined,” boasts Meadows.
Meadows’s mission is to put multi-team, national programs together for marketers looking to sample, coupon, sponsor – whatever. The minor leagues’ notion of promotion, after all, is as far-ranging as a Casey Stengel monologue. Problem is, most brand-slingers have never heard of Meadows or his 98-year-old St. Petersburg, FL-based association. (The marketing department didn’t get fired up until ’93.)
“The Veryfine juice company wanted to do a big promotion with minor league baseball. They’re located about 15 minutes from our team in Lowell, Massachusetts, but they had no idea we existed,” says Meadows. “They got their ad agency in and gave them a charge to find something.”
They found Meadows, eventually, and now are putting the finishing touches on a program involving 110 NAPBL teams. Veryfine is considering a label offer on its juice bottles for discount tickets and team merchandise. Also in the works are 50-plus-team promotional deals with Hershey Chocolate and Warner-Lambert’s Rolaids brand.
“There are a lot of marketers interested in doing these multiple team deals, but the promotion agencies would have to do it all, and they don’t know how,” says Meadows. “They don’t have the personnel to manage it.”
So Meadows still spends a lot of his time out beating the bushes, giving presentations to brand people and promo shops who salivate over his young-family demographics.
“When I took this job I thought, ‘The ceiling is so high,'” says Meadows.
High? Nonexistent, you should say. What do you think this is, the Skydome?
