With all the focus on today’s Super Bowl commercials, it’s easy to lose sight of the real reason for the mass audience. NFL Football.
Thankfully, my friend Charlie Quirk, an account executive at Overland Agency in Portland, published a piece on his site and Bleacher Report about how both the Green Bay Packers and the Pittsburgh Steelers are two of the strongest team brands in all of professional sports.
In order to understand why these two NFL brands remain popular independent of their win-loss record, Quirk examines four brand dimensions each franchise uses to its advantage in maintaining the emotional investment of fans.
Here’s Quirk on consistency:
After the time-honored staples of differentiation and relevance, consistency is often seen as the next most important tenet of branding. Change, while inevitable, is not always seen as a good thing. An unwavering brand proposition begets familiarity and affection, traits that resonate strongly in Middle-America cities like Pittsburgh and Green Bay.
Here’s Quirk on geography:
In gritty, less transient, cities like Green Bay and Pittsburgh (or Manchester or Liverpool for that matter), sports teams often become inseparable from the fabric of the town, engendering a strong sense of identity for the locals.
The other two brand attributes, or dimensions, are iconography and community.
I appreciate Quirk’s article. The biggest winners in today’s so-called Related
