Pittsburgh Steelers: Five Super Bowl rings, six trips to the big game.
Arizona Cardinals: None of the above.
The Steelers can rightly consider themselves veterans of the Super Bowl; almost all their fans can remember their last win a mere three years ago. So Pittsburgh-area businesses are savvy about how to gain from the team’s success.
Arizona businesses have some work to do, since the Steelers’ fan base has greater depth than the Cardinals’. A December study by New Jersey-based Turnkey Sports and Entertainment assessed the strength of professsional sports brands among hometown fans.
The Steelers, which placed first on the 2007 version of the study, were still in excellent standing on the 2008 list, coming in third. The Cardinals, however, don’t have nearly that kind of popularity — or didn’t when Turnkey did its poll— ranking No. 120 out of 122 teams across three pro sports.
In the spirit of camaraderie, the Pittsburgh Business Times asked Pittsburgh-area businesses to give ideas from their Super Bowl play books to their Arizona counterparts.
Albert Elovitz, owner of Albert’s Gifts in the city’s Strip District, said Pittsburgh fans “will buy anything” when the team is on a run to the Super Bowl. “I doubt Arizona fans will be ready to buy on the same scale, so they want to start out small,” Elovitz said. “No one wants to carry extra stock, so you have to be conservative.”
Elovitz, who stocks an array of Steelers’ merchandise, advises Arizona merchants not to get items with the year or date printed on them, so anything left over can be stocked the next year. And be careful not to fixate too much on one player, he said: if Cardinals’ quarterback Kurt Warner gets injured, or retires after the game, for instance, it might be hard to sell his jerseys next season.
“For a while anything with Big Ben on it, or with No. 7, was flying off the shelves,” Elovitz said. “Now the hottest things are Hines Ward and Polamalu. You never know.”
Elovitz knows what he’s talking about: he had some items left over when one Tommy Maddox left the Steelers on less-than-stellar terms after Super Bowl XL.
And retailers should also be aware that the National Football League has an if/when clause for its manufacturers; retailers order merchandise like hats and shirts, and it’s shipped if and when the retailer’s team wins.
Vincent Delie, banking group president at First National Bank of Pennsylvania Corp., isn’t going to the game, but the company’s season tickets will be, along with a top client. He couldn’t say who that might be, but said the bank’s tickets are regularly used for networking opportunities.
But Delie advised Arizona companies looking to use season tickets to woo or entertain clients to think outside the company box. “What ends up happening, is you meet people there,” usually other clients who have their own season tickets to use. “You arrange to entertain them while you’re there, and deals can get done that way.”
His preference would have been for a Steelers-Eagles Super Bowl, since Hermitage-based F.N.B. is a regional bank. But there are still opportunities to be had, Delie said.
Eat’n Park is a company whose brand is almost as synonymous with Pittsburgh as the Steelers’. The restaurant is so devoted to the team that it plans to close all its locations early on Sunday .
Homestead-based Eat’n Park’s Super Bowl promotion, a dozen Steelers smiley cookies and two Terrible Towels for $24.99, was setting online sales records for the restaurant, and was close to selling out Monday afternoon.
Kevin O’Connell, Eat’n Park’s senior vice president of marketing, said his advice for Arizona companies was to be genuine. Jumping on the bandwagon at the last minute is no way for a business to become part of the team.
“You have to tap into the passion, and you have to be authentic, and follow the team,” O’Connell said. “Everyone here probably already has jerseys, but everyone in Arizona probably doesn’t. There’s a limited window of opportunity, and once it passes, it’s hard to catch up.”