Devoted to branding and building and protecting brands

Even a university that brands itself as The Home of Champions can suffer marketing-gene sleeping sickness. Consider Stanford University’s moribund football “brand”. While Stanford has never really been synonymous with college football in the tradition of its private-school rival USC, The Cardinal’s annual honors for national championships, (predominantly the sports played in water or on courts) positioned this prestigious university as a place where athletics amounted to far more than a club activity. Indeed, Stanford’s annual athletic budget is among the heftiest in the NCAA. Back to football -- and the lessons to be drawn from Stanford’s lapsed brand. The Cardinal unveils a sparkling, state-of-the-art football stadium this fall. The problem? Filling it. As of this writing, the New Stanford Stadium is less than one-third sold. The implications of unsold seats are many and ominous. That Stanford would be struggling, as summer approaches, to sell season tickets is hardly a surprise, however. Stanford may not have "burned" any bridges with local fans in the strict sense of the word, but the problem is that it didn't build any either. This is killing them today, along with football-unfriendly entrance requirements and a student body that couldn't care less about the game. No out-reach to the surrounding communities, no cultivation, nothing. This failure, coupled with the residual effect of four consecutive losing seasons of really lousy football, is now coming back to haunt the program. In the San Francisco Bay Area, college athletics are not the draw of pro sports. There are endless other “sporting” distractions as well: youth soccer games being most prominent, and Stanford game times vary week to week, depending on the dictates of television. Which doesn’t make the planning any easier for casual fans. Here’s the irony: when distractions were few or none, Stanford football reached out aggressively to the surrounding communities and youth groups. It marketed the team, the individual players, and the upcoming opponents. Attendance in the old stadium in the early 1980s, even when Cardinal teams were losing more often than not, routinely exceeded what the new stadium will now hold (50,000-plus). Today, with countless distractions, Stanford’s “marketing” is as forgettable as its recent record in football. Add to this a game-day experience that is as as unfriendly to fans as the University's admissions office has been to football athlete applicants, and you have a ticket-sales shortfall. Hardly shocking. The football marketing gene at Stanford may not be dead, but it could use a quick kick.