ESPN the Magazine came out recently with the "Ultimate Standings."  In it, they rank every pro team in the 4 major sports (yes, they included hockey) on a number of characteristics,including ownership, players, stadium, value, beer prices and more.

Unsurprisingly, the Seattle Sonics ranked 111 out of 121 teams.  Until now, I really hadn’t thought about the Marketing efforts the Sonics have undertaken lately, but would you repeat these if you were running a company:

1) Alienate your evangelists by moving your games off of the sports station and onto a conservative talk radio station. 

2) Allow an executive (in this case the head coach) with 20+ years in the organization to leave for an arch-rival.

3) Have 50 of the most influential sports fans in town cut ties with the team, and make a killing on their investment.

4) Ask fans who enjoy some of the closest seats to the court, to give those up in order to pay higher taxes, sit further away and drive to Renton.

5) Take arguably the greatest play by play caller in the NBA today, a guy who can paint a picture of a basketball court in 4 words, and move him to TV to be replaced on radio by a guy that drives some fans crazy (honestly, I actually like Locke as a reporter but I see why he drives some guys nuts).

6) Now, couple all this with a sub-standard product

You either need a great product or great salesmanship to get people to buy something, and unfortunately the Sonics have failed to show much of either.  Now the strategy seems to be to threaten to leave. 

So, given that the Sonics owners are smarter than I am, I see a different view.  We’re simply not the target audience.  They don’t really care about what we think.  The target customer is the representatives in Olympia that can get a deal done without our vote and the corporate sponsors who will spend money to fill up the luxury boxes and acreage of advertising. 

That’s not a bad strategy I suppose.  But when your target market is legislators and business people, it’s not hard to imagine how you become 111th on the list of sports franchises.