Atlanta Hawks Unlock Secrets to Winning Over Modern Sports Fan
ATLANTA—Everyone remembers the kid who tried too hard to be liked—always giving something away, butting into other people’s conversations, never failing to kill a good joke.
The lesson was clear: Nobody likes desperate. Allowing people to like something or someone is a far more effective approach than begging.
The Atlanta Hawks realized they had a similar problem, not long ago. They needed to be liked, but they had to be smart about winning Atlanta’s favor.
To make matters worse, they faced a PR nightmare after racially insensitive remarks from previous ownership about Atlanta’s fanbase and Luol Deng were made public. Some apologizing was necessary, as was an overhaul of the franchise's business philosophies.
‘We Just Didn’t Have a Story’
“People knew we existed, they just didn’t care,” says Peter Sorckoff, Senior Vice President of Marketing and Chief Creative Officer for the Hawks. “Initially it was like, ‘we just need to win because we hadn’t won in nine years and once we start winning people will come.’ So five or six years in we’ve been winning on the regular, and it was like, we just have to make the second round.
“So we made the second round and it still didn’t happen. ‘Oh, it’s because we haven’t ever gotten to the Eastern Conference Finals.’ I don’t know if I believe this pattern, almost this organizational mythology that we keep telling ourselves. There’s nothing tangible that says that’s true.”
Steve Koonin has worked for some of Atlanta’s biggest companies, including Coca-Cola and Turner (full disclosure: Turner is the parent company of Bleacher Report), and held Hawks season tickets for many years. He was well aware of Atlanta’s apathetic relationship with the Hawks, but he wasn't entirely certain why.
“My general thought was that we just didn’t have a story,” Koonin said. “We didn’t have a vibe. We weren’t necessarily placed in the hearts and minds of Atlanta fans.”
Koonin took over as Hawks CEO in 2014 and brought with him current Hawks Senior Vice President Melissa Proctor, among others. He also brought with him unique experience working with Tyler Perry on the show House of Payne.
“(Perry) understands his audience better than anybody,” Koonin said. “He’s not trying to win awards, he’s not trying to be something he’s not. He understands who his audience is. Everyone’s welcome, but he understands an audience and we’re in the business of audience. Fans are audiences.”
The Hawks had to figure out who exactly they needed to sell to and came to the conclusion it would be businesses, Millennials and a multicultural demographic that more accurately represented the city (black people make up 54 percent of Atlanta’s population according to the 2010 census).
The Hawks hired a company called MotiveQuest to learn more about their fanbase. The company compiled data from July 2011 to July 2012 and used a linguistic algorithm to analyze every online conversation about the Hawks during that period. After sorting through about 1.7 million conversations, the study had four major conclusions:
1. Atlanta had little emotional attachment to the Hawks. People used “emotionally disconnecting” words when discussing the Hawks. Sorckoff recalled a comment from an Atlanta Journal-Constitution blog post: “You should watch the Hawks as you would an Australian rules football game. With curiosity, but without emotion because it is difficult to understand what they are doing.” In a business that deals in emotion, the Hawks weren’t eliciting any.
2. Star players were polarizing in all the wrong ways. In professional sports, especially the NBA, teams are defined by their star players. For the Hawks, in the mid-to-late 2000s, those players were Josh Smith and Joe Johnson. However, studies showed they were polarizing, to put it nicely.
Fans perceived Smith as petulant, arrogant and selfish. Johnson was viewed as devoid of emotion, catatonic. The fans responded much better to role players, specifically Zaza Pachulia and Ivan Johnson. “There’s no downside with those guys because they’re just heart and soul,” Sorckoff said. “Guys that fans can look at and say, ‘I can see a little bit of myself in that guy.’”
3. Nostalgia matters. Fans were also nostalgic about the teams from the mid-1980s and early '90s, despite more consistent postseason success in the current era. People felt a strong connection and intimacy with those teams. Everyone had a nickname: Tree, Doc, Spud, 'Nique. That signified a different type of relationship.
4. Atlanta's grudges wouldn't go away. A related finding seems obvious, but nobody quite understood the depths of the issue: Atlanta was still upset with the Hawks for trading Dominique Wilkins in 1994. It didn’t matter that Wilkins was still involved in the organization or that his jersey was retired. The fanbase couldn’t let go of the resentment.
“They were not only pissed off that we traded him, they were pissed off that we sent him to the Siberia of the NBA (the Los Angeles Clippers),” Sorckoff said. “They were pissed off that what we got in return didn’t pan out. They were pissed off that the way he was traded was not befitting of how much people loved him here. The fact is, if you treated that guy that way, that’s indicative of the way you would treat me.”
'Funny is Hard’
You hear “authenticity” and “relevance” frequently while hanging around Hawks marketing staffers. Rather than bring an audience an interpretation of young people on the internet, the Hawks bring them actual young people live and in color. One of them is Digital Content Manager Jaryd Wilson, a first-ballot Twitter Hall of Famer, if such a thing existed (it should).
The @ATLHawks handle is a collaborative effort, but Wilson was hired to make it his own. He thinks the reason it works is not that he is funny, but that he can speak the language.
“Funny is hard,” Proctor said. “We definitely try to be on the smarter side of more playful than to be funny all of the time.”
For those who have something negative to say about the Hawks, it is noticed and addressed. Two years ago, when ESPN’s Darren Rovell tweeted that nobody cared about Kyle Korver’s record for consecutive games with a three-pointer, Wilson kindly pointed out a tweet from ESPN Stats & Info showing that someone cared. Earlier in November, Grammarly ranked all NBA fanbases by grammar mistakes, noting that Hawks fans had the 28th-worst grammar of all NBA teams, prompting this response:
Koonin is quick to point out his generation was raised on Warner Bros. and Bugs Bunny, while Millennials were raised on South Park and Family Guy. That's what he wants for the Hawks—for the habits and tastes of today's generation to be referenced and served.
Sorckoff cites a conversation he had with the University of Oregon athletic department as particularly influential. Sorckoff asked an administrator about Oregon’s famously wacky attire and was told “we decided to embrace the fact that we have no tradition.”
It was a reminder that you can’t sell what you don’t have. Certain teams can market a ring of honor, championship banners and unmistakable superstars. By comparison, it seemed as if the Hawks had nothing. But by accepting and acknowledging their shortcomings, they found value. They found liberation.
Who cares if they changed the color scheme and uniforms to look like superheroes? Nobody bought the old ones. Put a templated letter on social media offering free tickets to local businesses for allowing employees to come in late the night after a late game. Send messages to fans through song titles on Spotify playlists. A new brand is being built, so use new strategies to construct it.
Still, the Hawks are trying to build tradition. A 60-win season last year was a nice boost, but team success is very cyclical. The Green Bay Packers have more than 100,000 people on a waiting list for season tickets. That kind of devotion comes from something deeper than team performance.
Koonin referenced a YouTube short describing University of Georgia football fans as a species emerging from hibernation. “Every year the Georgia Bulldog fan returns with his heart filled with hope and then bad things happen," Koonin said. “The reason we feel that way, as Georgia fans, is we always believe we’re a play away, a player away, something away from being a champion. And that’s that emotion. That’s what we have to build here: When we lose it hurts you, and when we win it exalts you.”
‘Everything’s Changed’
Fast-forward to present day: A statue of Dominique Wilkins resides by the entrance of the arena, which sits on a street named Dominique Wilkins Lane.
Promotions are incredible experiments. The Tinder-inspired Swipe Right Night and a flex-plan campaign featuring a real-life Ashley Madison are just a few of the many winning promotions. The team’s code of conduct videos have become events unto themselves. More importantly, year-over-year season ticket sales were up 500 percent last season.
Still, the Hawks seem to be distancing themselves from what arguably used to be the most lukewarm franchise in professional sports.
Shooting guard Kyle Korver has been with the Hawks since 2012 and can speak frankly to the sweeping changes.
“It’s completely different,” Korver said. “The people are different. A lot of people behind the scenes, players on the court, coaching staff, owners, logo, color scheme, court, a different style of play, everything’s changed. I don’t think anything’s the same, to be honest with you.”
The Atlanta Hawks are not begging for acceptance. They’re the new kid from the city saying, “I bet you’ve never seen this before.”
All quotes were obtained firsthand for this article.
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