Agile Marketing

No matter what the Tampa Bay Rays do in the 2008 playoffs—and as of now, they’re set to take on the Boston Red Sox later this week for the American League Pennant, without question, 2008 was perhaps the most pivotal year in the franchise’s brief 10-year history.  Why?  Because from 1998 to 2007, the Rays finished last in the American League East every single year except for once, in 2004, when they finished fourth (out of five teams).  This year?  The Rays finished first, beating the second place Red Sox by two full games.

Could it have been their marketing makeover that put them over?

In 2006, former Goldman Sachs managing partner Stuart Sternberg purchased the struggling franchise—then known as the Devil Rays—and installed former Procter & Gamble brand manager Darcy Raymond as the Ray’s Vice President of Branding and Fan Experience.  Under Raymond’s watch, the team changed its name from the Devil Rays to the Rays (the former a nickname for the manta ray, the latter, according to Sternberg, “a beacon that radiates throughout Tampa Bay and across the entire state of Florida”), changed their color scheme from green to blue, and instituted a list of “customer touch points” to make sure the game experience is fun for the fans.

These touch points are no laughing matter.  Rays executives constantly monitor and measure them to gauge customer satisfaction.  According to Raymond, as quoted in Ad Age, “It’s a lot like what P&G does with brand-equity models.  We know when our cleaning scores dip or when our security wasn’t helpful enough.”

Of course, all these initiatives would amount to little if the Rays didn’t play well on the field.  This year, with the addition of former Mets pitcher Scott Kazmir and the emergence of third baseman Evan Longoria, the Rays made—in one year, no less—a last-to-first transformation worthy of legend.  Once the perennial doormats of the American League East, this year Tampa Bay wrested the division title from both the Boston Red Sox and the New York Yankees—teams with a combined payroll of nearly a third of a billion dollars.

Tampa Bay’s payroll?  A modest $48 million, or, on average, less than the cost of two years of Alex Rodriguez’s service as the Yankee third baseman.

On the commercial side of things, however, the Rays still have a long way to go.  Despite their rags to riches story, their home attendance ranked 26th out of MLB’s 30 teams.  Rays executives point to a one-year lag for “worst to first” teams to explain this phenomenon; it takes time for the locals to hop on the bandwagon.  Also, the Rays’ home field—Tropicana Field—deserves part of the blame.  In addition to being renowned throughout Major League Baseball as one of the worst places to play the game—its awful artificial playing surface and in-play ceiling catwalks, for example—its location isn’t convenient to Tampa Bay or Orlando.

Here, again, the Rays’ executives’ passion for metrics will serve them well.  By tracking enough negative metrics for the Tropicana Field experience, they’ll have enough hard evidence to support, perhaps, the construction of a ballpark worthy of an AL East contender.

By Robert Pothier