Strategic Marketing Associates has been retained to do everything from selecting brand of hot dogs served at games to finding a unified logo
The Brown Bear's image is getting buffed up thanks to an outside consulting firm that has been hired to help find ways to put more people in the stands at sporting events and increase the prestige of Brown athletics.
Strategic Marketing Associates (SMA), a Manhattan-based company that also represents Major League Soccer, has been retained to do everything from selecting the brand of hot dogs served at games to finding a unified logo for Brown athletics. SMA's hiring was made possible through a gift from Tom and Bill Gilbane '33, longtime supporters of Brown athletics.
"Brown has done marketing and promotions [of its athletic teams] in the past," said athletic director David Roach. "But it has been done when people who had other responsibilities had the time and interest to do it. Now we are making a commitment to doing it really well, which will only benefit all of our programs."
SMA has assigned Rob Diestel to the athletic department, where he will be based full-time. "That is one of the things that attracted us to SMA," said Roach. "To have someone here working closely with us on a day-to-day basis is very important for this to work."
Diestel will work to attract more corporate sponsorship for Brown teams, create a unified logo for all teams, raise awareness of Brown athletic teams in the Brown and Rhode Island communities, and most importantly attract bigger crowds to sporting events. He will also be looking at ways to get Brown apparel and merchandise into retail outlets. (Currently, the Brown Bookstore is the only place where it can be purchased.)
"There has always been a tendency at Ivy League schools and at Brown to be apologetic about athletics," said Roach. "If Brown strives to be great at everything it does, there is no reason why Brown can't have an athletic image on par with someplace like a Stanford or Duke."
Diestel is in the research phase of creating a five-year marketing plan for Brown athletic teams. He is examining demand trends for tickets to Brown sporting events, local demographics, the economy and the competition for the area's sports fans. He will use this information to find ways to make Brown athletics more of a household name not only in Rhode Island, but nationwide.
He is also working to fill the stands as quickly as possible. At the Brown football game against Yale, he arranged for live music, T-shirt giveaways, games of chance (selected people had a chance to win a Chevrolet by hitting a target with a football), free refreshments for first-year students wearing their Class of 2000 baseball caps, two-for-one deals on tickets for local residents, and offering T-shirts commemorating the women's crew's national championship to the first 500 students riding the bus to the Brown stadium.
The new angles appeared to work. There were 7,304 people in attendance, nearly double the average at last year's games. "We are not trying to make Brown a Division 1 powerhouse," said Diestel. "We are just trying to make people more aware and the events themselves more entertaining."
Although Brown is the first of the Ivy League schools to hire an outside marketing firm, it apparently won't be the last. Several Ivy League schools have contacted SMA to learn more about the work being done at Brown. "This is really the test case for the rest of the Ivy League," Diestel said.
With 35 athletic teams, Diestel feels he has his work cut out for him. "Most Big 10 and SEC schools have a team of marketing and promotion people and only 17 teams on average," he said. But he also believes that diversity and the quality of student athletes at Brown makes the situation unique. "The type of student athletes at Brown are much better role models than the ones that you find at some of the larger schools," he said. "That is a great selling point."