|
NEW YORK (CNN/Money) -
How many home cities can the Angels perch on the head of a pin?Apparently, two is too many.
Last week, the Southern California baseball team announced it would henceforth call itself the Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim. The news has caused more derision than anything else.
The Web site of the local paper, the Orange County Register, posted overwhelmingly negative reader comments on the proposed name change from the Anaheim Angels.
The City of Anaheim went further, by suing the Angels. In 1996, the city gave the team $20 million to renovate its stadium, in return for incorporating Anaheim into the team's name. The awkward, double-fisted new name violates that agreement, it charges.
Even team officials admit that the name change has brought more grief than gain.
"The feedback initially was very harsh," said Angels spokesman Tim Mead. "But we knew we were not going to reap immediate dividends from this name change. It's a long term venture."
Team officials, including owner Arte Moreno, who purchased the team in the wake of its 2002 World Series win, argue that by adding Los Angeles to the name, it will make the team more valuable in terms of future broadcast and sponsorship rights.
"It's really a business decision based what's the best representation of being in the nation's No. 2 media market," said Mead.
The team has broadcast revenue of only about $15 million a year, about half of what the Los Angeles Dodgers get and less than some less successful teams in far smaller media markets, such as the Detroit Tigers.
"You have an owner who wants to spend what it takes to compete," said Mead. "You don't want fans to foot the entire bill. So you want to come up the other sources of revenue that it takes to put a perennial contender on the field."
The Angels are not the only ones with a geographically-challenged name. There are nine other major sports teams with homes outside the borders of the cities for which they are named.
The former Los Angeles Rams played in the same stadium as the Angels from 1980 through 1994, without shedding the L.A. moniker. Nobody raised much of a stink before the team moved to St. Louis for the 1995 season.
Then again, if a team is seen as taking away a connection it had with fans, a name change can do more harm than good.
The Green Bay Packers would find it had less fan support if they tried to become the Milwaukee or Wisconsin Packers. The team was smart enough to keep the Green Bay name even in the years it played almost half its games in Milwaukee.
Sports marketing expert Marc Ganis says that as silly as the Angels' new name seems, it could be a long-term winner, as the team tries to build more affinity with young fans throughout the Los Angeles metropolitan area. But he said the move has its risks.
"For whatever the reason, the geographic moniker makes a difference," said Ganis. "The geographic connection creates a base of fans."
Ganis said the importance of building on geographic loyalties is the primary reason we haven't seen teams adopt corporate names, as many baseball teams in Japan have done.
Nascar, where race teams travel between tracks rather than depend on a group of home fans, has proved that corporate team names can be successful in United States. But the corporate dollars wouldn't be worth the loss of identification with the fan base, said Ganis.
"I think a company would be eager to do it; the visibility would offset the backlash," he said. "But the team would lose in the equation."
The awkward two-city moniker -- forced by the team's lease with the city coupled with its desire to add the Los Angeles name -- may represents the worst of both.
Ganis said there's a risk that backlash against the name change could have some impact on ticket sales. Many Orange County residents see their home as distinct from Los Angeles, not part of some interconnected sprawl.
An estimated 65 percent of the Angels' record 3.4 million ticket sales came from Orange County residents, Mead said. But so far, season ticket order cancellations have been minimal. The team's recent success -- it finished first last year -- should help the mitigate the backlash.
"Winning is the great deodorant," Ganis said. "Even if this is a marketing mistake, and I'm not saying it is, winning goes a long way to fixing it."
But as Yogi Berra might say, the Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim will be a loser if the team stops winning.
|
