Having a terrific product is not always enough to sustain a brand. The essence of the Globetrotters business is promotions and relationships—with the media, with sponsors, and especially with customers. Our first line of customers is the people who own the arenas and their marketing staffs. If they won’t book your event and promote it, you’re in big trouble—you won’t even get to the next line of customers, the people who actually buy the tickets.
The marketers are assigned to 50 cities, and all they do year round is meet with the arena managers, their marketing staffs, and with businesses that want to promote our events. They work with the arenas to develop a promotions strategy for each game to make sure it’s successful. And the relationships we’ve forged with the people in the arenas have paid off in the way we get promoted. The arena managers have friends who sponsor events. They also have contacts who do group sales, and they have relationships with the local media. Access to these channels has been invaluable. Media attention helps cement our relationships with fans and increases the promotion of our events. We use each event to connect directly with fans, the customers who buy from our sponsors and fill the arenas, and we also reach out to our audience in other ways. Our social commitment, an important part of the brand’s value, is at the heart of this. Like any company engaged in grassroots marketing, we’ve had to overcome obstacles.
A lot of what goes on involving sponsorships is really irrational. It’s like deciding whether to buy a corporate jet. You can draw up a list of pros and cons, but ultimately it comes down to one question: do you want the jet or not? The same is true, unfortunately, for the way too many decisions about sponsorships get made.
Ethics courses have a number of features that seem likely to influence behavior. They provide a language and conceptual framework with which one can talk and think about ethical issues. Their emphasis on case studies helps to make one aware of the potential consequences of one’s actions. They present ethical that theories help define what a valid ethical argument looks like. They teach one to make distinctions and avoid fallacies that are so common when people make decisions. They give one an opportunity to think through, at one’s leisure, complex ethical issues that are likely to arise later, when there is no time to think. They introduce one to such specialized areas as product liability, employment, intellectual property, environmental protection, and cross-cultural management. They give one practice at articulating an ethical position, which can help resist pressure to compromise. None of this convinces one to be good, but it is useful to those who want to be good. It may also improve business conduct in general. How many of the recent business scandals would have occurred if subordinates had possessed the skills, vocabulary and conceptual equipment to raise an ethical issue with their coworkers?