You may not care about the contraction of major league baseball any more than you care about how Rangers and Celtic are faring in the Scottish Premier League, but as anyone involved in marketing, the simple fact of its implications should intrigue you.

The eminent contraction of major league baseball, by which I mean the possible, potential and probable elimination of the Minnesota Twins and Montreal Expos is, in many ways, not unlike the contraction of a brand portfolio. The Twins and Expos are, if you listen to the press, “less than appealing,” suffer from a lack of aesthetics, and have a bad atmosphere. All vague terms to be sure – especially when one considers the price tag associated with contraction.

And yet, are these not virtually the same terms used time and again by marketing managers as they eliminate brands from their portfolio? The brand has lost its appeal, they say – consumers aren’t interested in it, they have no emotional connection to it, they cannot articulate why it’s important to them. In truth, it has ceased to exist as a brand.

But wait a minute, are teams really brands at all?

One friend of mine contends they are. Another has been put in the position of transforming a team in to a brand. And me? I’m somewhere in the middle.

The friend who believes teams are brands points to things like heritage, history, personality and the emotional connection the team has with its fans. He argues that teams like the Yankees, the Mets, the Dodgers and the Giants are clearly brands.

But consider those teams. Yes, they’re all baseball teams, and yes, they’re all originally from New York. But it’s no accident that all those teams grew up in multi-team markets. For just as with brands in the packaged goods or service arenas, sports teams brands are honed and focused by their competition. Or rather, they are honed and focused or they die.

This, of course, is not the case in places like Atlanta or Milwaukee or Philadelphia or, notably, Montreal or Minnesota. In essence, the teams in those towns became baseball. They became the category and so the proposition became not so much about being an Expos fan as about being a baseball fan. And if you consider that a difference of infinitely slim proportions, then translate it to a category you feel comfortable with – phone service, gasoline, beer. Beer, I think, is a particularly apt parallel to teams.

Consider the beer business fifty years ago. The category itself was national in scope, but the individual brands were overwhelmingly regional. Sure, you had Budweiser, Schlitz and Miller High Life. But they were anomalies. They were brands whose fierce competition in their own markets drove them to find other consumers or perish. And while these brands had their fans at home, as well as in every market, they were never bigger in those “foreign markets” than the home team.

The home teams – beers like Rhinegold, Lone Star, Hamm’s, Weidemann’s and others – were the dominant players. The ones people grew up with. The ones that people had an emotional connection with. The ones their parents and grandparents had enjoyed.

Why? Because they were local. Because by and large, they were the only game in town – or had been for so long that they had built up a great head start against any competition. Because they were the category, and so didn’t have to articulate a reason for being beyond that of the category. Drink beer instead of wine or whiskey. And if you’re going to drink beer, you’re going to drink us.

And what happened? The national brands (with a notable exception) grew, and by growing, changed the playing field. Suddenly, the local beers – which had spent all their time selling “beer” instead of themselves – began to lose their reasons for being. “Drink beer” or “drink us now because you didn’t used to have a choice” didn’t seem quite as compelling. So, of course, those brands went away – or went on to exist in vastly reduced circumstances.

The parallels are clear with baseball, and for essentially the same reasons. The playing field has changed. Teams like the Atlanta Braves – who were jammed down our throats when they were awful and cable television was in its infancy – became a national team, a sort of “team of the South,” and therefore a brand. The Yankees – love them or hate them – became the standard of excellence against which baseball teams – within New York and without – measured themselves. The Cubs, primarily thanks to popular culture, found themselves transformed from mere losers, into the “Charlie Browns of Baseball.” And what team is a better walking, living, breathing embodiment of Murphy’s Law than the Boston Red Sox?

And baseball is no different from football or basketball. The teams that are brands are the teams that exist on a national stage, and which have defined themselves to a national audience. The Oakland Raiders are a national team, because they are the de-facto “bad boys” of American football – so much so that other teams – like the Detroit Pistons of the 1980s – are routinely referred to as the “Oakland Raiders of the NBA.”

Basketball brings us the interesting case of the Chicago Bulls. Instead of defining themselves with an attitude (like the Raiders), or a unique personal history (like, say, the Yankees) or a distinct cultural heritage (for example, the Montreal Canadiens) they seem to have built their brand around Michael Jordan. Not that you can blame them, of course. Six titles in eight years to a team that had never even been to the finals is certainly a compelling reason.

But now that his Airness has left the Bulls, we find that not only did he take away their winning ways, he also took their brand identity. What are the Bulls now? What do they mean to fans outside of Chicago. And with attendance, endorsements and merchandising sales down, what do they even mean to the fans inside Chicago?

This is essentially the issue facing a friend of mine who has recently signed on as Marketing Director at a major sports organization. What does his team mean? Is it just the local franchise of the national professional organization? Is it just the sum total of its awards, players, histories and statistics? And if so, is that enough? And if it’s not enough, what is and how do you get it?

My personal feeling is that it’s not, and I point to the Twins, the Expos, the Washington Senators, the Winnipeg Jets, the Minnesota North Stars, the St. Louis Hawks, the Los Angeles Rams, the Houston Oilers, the New Orleans Jazz, and my own personal favorite, the Hartford Whalers, as examples. These were teams that existed only by virtue of their local monopoly – and when that monopoly was broken, whether it was by cable television, by the internet, by demographic shifts, or by popular culture, so were these teams broken.

And the fact of the matter is that today, the local monopoly does not exist in any real or sustainable sense, and any team that relies on it for survival is on a fast track to elimination. When I can watch any team on cable, when I can buy any team’s gear online, when I can be as much a fan of that team as 90 percent of the people in that team’s market, then all teams are, de facto, playing on a national stage. Therefore, they must articulate a national brand personality.

Those that do, like the Yankees, the Bulls in the 90s, or the Canadiens in Canada will survive. Those that don’t will be contracted or moved to other cities.

And lest you think I am being pessimistic, consider this – our discussion has only focused on North America. The alliance between Manchester United and the New York Yankees, the globalization of SkySports (FoxSportsWorld in the US), and the arrival and success of players like Ichiro, Pau Gasol, and Jaromir Jagr means that teams will be forced to compete not just with teams in their own countries or on their own continents, but around the world.

Are teams brands? Not all of them. Only the ones that will survive. (03-Jun-02)

Martin Bihl is co-creative director and senior vice president at Renegade Marketing Group, which builds brands through unconventional means.