The Boston Celtics brand lives on

Lineage: one of the most important attributes in any world-class brand. The ability to take the consumer back to a positive emotional state of mind is something that great brands can do.

This year’s Boston Celtics team, from a truly product perspective, have as much in common with the Celtics teams of the 80s as the RIT Women’s team. Again, from a truly product (players, coach, style of play, etc.) perspective, there is very little in common-not better, not worse, just different. However, to the credit of the franchise, and the networks, they consistently leveraged the yesteryears of the Celtics organization, created an emotional bond with the targeted demographics, and convinced the market that yes, the Celtics brand is not dead, it was just on hiatus.

Imagine if the organization and the networks took on a different strategy this year: let’s forget the past, and redefine the Celtics brand as more relevant with today’s younger demographic; let’s make it more hip and highlight the attributes of our current team (kind of like Cadillac did with the Escalade and DTS strategy). Forget the stodgyness of Red’s cigar, Larry’s tight shorts, Bill’s sweeping skyhook, and let’s rebuild the brand through KG’s thunderous slams, a cooler logo, and the promise that the Celtics are the most in your face, entertaining team in the league. This is exactly what the Philadelphia 76ers did when they reinvented their franchise and exchanged the attributes of Dr. J and Moses Malone for a more younger, urban-relevant, brand when they went to the finals in 2000-2001.

The marketers knew where their bread was buttered through convincing the public that yes, this is the old Celtics experience, we are going to beat LA, and the glory years are back like you remember them; all of the emotional ties to the brand were reconnected, and things are back to “normal”. To reinforce this: the public didn’t even care that during the finals, it was suggested by a former referee that playoff games have been fixed, and even this series could be. It bounced off the consumer’s mind – don’t mess with this trip down memory lane media.

Of course, winning creates interest, but it was very interesting how every advertisement, statistic, etc reinforced the attributes of the old Boston Celtics experience: this is the Cadillac organization of the NBA and the Lakers are the Mustang. We were hammered over and over with these messages, and as a result, The Boston Celtics brand is back.

This entry was posted on Friday, June 20th, 2008 at 4:12 pm and is filed under brand, brand management. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.