Who's pulling the trigger?Updated: December 20th, 2006
I’m curious as to why new TVs have been blaring out at full-blast on the concourses at CoMS.
According to Bluemoon. poster Mike D, who received a reply from the club following his complaint, the TVs have been installed free by an advertising company in return for pumping out adverts at half time.
It’s likely that City are also being paid for the deal, as this type of advertising has become a lucrative source of income for companies such as transport providers in the US and the UK.
Not only does this reveal an “anything for a quick buck” mentality, but I believe it also offers a good insight into how the City board views the fans.
Nowhere is this more clear than with the ‘This is our City’ ad campaign.
I realise those ads have proved popular, but I’ve always been at a loss to understand how they have helped the club, particuarly as the money spent on the huge campaign could have instead been spent on the team.
So I decided to take a closer look at the people behind the adverts.
According to the Manchester Evening News, the campaign, which sprung from a ‘long term relationship’ between City’s chief executive Alistair Mackintosh and Julian Douglas - senior account director at ad agency Grey London - was not meant to be in any way a cash generator.
“The brief was to try and engage with Mancunians - current fans, lapsed fans and people who aren’t even fans. Our measure of success is that people talk about it and engage with it,” Douglas told the MEN .
So the aim of this expensive advertising campaign was to get people to talk about the ad campaign? Call me naive, but I always thought the point of advertising was to attract new customers and increase sales.
Earlier this year, after the campaign was shortlisted for an industry award, Mackintosh claimed the ads had reaped financial rewards.
“The results across all aspects of our business are unprecedented. ‘This is our City’ is something we will keep forever at Manchester City,” Mackintosh told the Institute of Practitioners in Advertising.
Since attendances and season ticket sales have been on the slide in the past year and more, this seems a bold claim indeed.
It was only after finding the website of the Grey Global Group, which owns Grey London, that the ads began to make sense. Kind of.
In a 2004 issue of The Hub magazine (strapline: thinking marketing for visionaries) Grey CEO Steve Blamer explained his firm’s approach to advertising.
In 2001 Grey Global assembled a team of “psychologists, social scientists, pollsters, academicians, statisticians and marketers” to carry out an exhaustive study to identify the emotions people associate with brands.
The result was a model called ‘Emotional Triggers’ which claims to pinpoint nine key emotions that trigger purchases - approachability, curiosity, empowerment, warmth, trust, relevance, familiarity, identification and pride.
The model was first used in the aftermath of 9/11, to improve confidence in the US postal service after five people died from anthrax sent through the post.
Since then it has been used to promote more than 140 brands worldwide.
Now, not only does it seem creepy to have your emotions so blatantly manipulated like this, but I’m at a loss to see how it improves the club’s position.
Persuading someone that they should have a strong emotional attachment to say, a brand of toothpaste, at least makes business sense and no doubt these types of campaigns work.
But the “This Is Our City” campaign was clearly aimed at existing fans. And City fans already have a strong emotional attachment to the club. A far, far more powerful attachment than any consumer will have with any product. Let’s face it, I’ve never heard anyone spontaneously sing: “I’m Colgate till I die” and I’m sure I never will.
Manipulating someone’s emotions to persuade them not to switch from ‘brand x’ to ‘brand y’ may make business sense, but City fans aren’t in the business of switching brands.
In fact, it really doesn’t need an exhaustive study by a team of eggheads to figure out what pulls our emotional triggers.
Buy some quality players, play good football, win big games. Emotions triggered.
When Dickov fired in the equaliser against Gillingham my emotions weren’t just triggered - they went ballistic.
I’m normally a pretty reserved kind of guy, but standing on a bar stool yelling like a nutter in a south London pub as surly Millwall fans looked on was possibly my most joyous moment as a City fan.
Real emotion, not some artificially manipulated feeling created by advertising executives.
(Actually, I’d been chatting to a Millwall fan earlier in the game. He was sporting a nasty cut to his nose and told me he’d just been released from the cells after a fight with City fans in Covent Garden the previous night. Fair play to him though, as he came over and shook my hand after the penalty shootout.)
In recent years only two other clubs - Southampton and Aston Villa - have used similar types of advertising. Like City, the ad campaigns coincided with periods of underachivement.
Millwall, currently in League One’s relegation zone, launched an ad campaign in August to rebrand the club as “smart, vibrant family-oriented”.
All of which gives the impression that campaigns of this type are a symptom of a management that has lost its way.
Maybe City’s campaign just reflects the business instincts of John Wardle and David Makin, whose multi-million fortune from JD Sports was built on the advertising that made designer labels more attractive than others.
Great when you need to shift sportswear, but not much help in getting a team higher up the league.
The things they sell on eBay
The boardroom table from Maine Road has just been sold on eBay.
It was originally sold off in July 2003 for £460 as part of an auction that raised up to £400,000 for the club.
Earlier this week it fetched £1,340 - representing a tidy profit of 92% per year.
If you haven’t already visited, eBay is the best place to buy City memorabilia. There’s around a thousand items listed at the moment. Most are shirts and old programmes, though there is a City garden gnome and an original watercolour drawing of CoMS currently for sale.
For a full guide to City items for sale, including books and DVDs, you can visit our shopping section here.