Footprint Center Demonstrates Value of Naming Rights For Growing Companies
BY ADAM GROSSMAN
Even though the Phoenix Suns lost in the National Basketball Association (NBA) Finals last night, the team’s overall successful on-court season recently received an additional off-court boost. The Suns and Phoenix Mercury arena will now be called the Footprint Center after the organization signed a new naming rights partnership with the environmental-based tech company.
Based in Arizona, Footprint develops and manufactures plant-based packaging products. It is well positioned to achieve success after the pandemic given its focus on sustainability and technology. As Suns managing partner Robert Sarver stated,” “Over time, I think you’ll see they’re going to be a household brand. They are in a space that is very popular among investors and among corporations who are also trying to improve their environmental footprint.”
Footprint’s decision to complete a naming rights deal should generate significant value given the company’s current profile. In another previous post on naming rights partnership, we highlighted that companies with relatively lower levels of brand awareness are those that can maximize value from naming rights deals. That is specifically because a primary benefit of naming rights deals is their reach and maximizing reach is a primary goal of these companies.
One challenge with naming rights is that enhanced awareness and sentiment have limited utility if a team’s fans do not overlap significantly with a company’s customers. We used our Audience Inference Platform (AIP) to better understand whether this could be the case for this deal.
We used our Audience Inference Platform (AIP) to understand whether Footprint can maximize its reach to the “right” audiences through its new partnership with the Suns. AIP can examine and determine audience profiles by using natural language processing and Block Six Analytics (B6A) proprietary algorithms. Essentially, we can determine who people are across multiple attributes based on what they say in organic posts on social media.
The table above shows a summary of the AIP results of examining both the Footprint and Suns audiences. We found that the Suns should enable Footprint to reach upper-income, more diverse, and younger audiences.
The Suns reach and scale will also enable Footprint to reach a larger number of current and potential customers. More specifically, this partnership enables Footprint to take advantage of both the domestic and global reach that the Suns can provide while reaching different subsets of its target audience.
One question that we commonly receive particularly as the sports industry (and the world more generally) emerges from COVID-19 is what industries and companies can potentially benefit from sports partnerships. Using AIP to understand how companies such as Footprint can use partnerships to engage with their target audiences at scale from naming rights partnerships is one example of how we answer this question.