February 11th, 2009 @ 5:30 am
Citibank, a company that’s taken billions of dollars in bailout money apparently plans to spend $400 million to stick its logo on a stadium. This giant branding exercise isn’t going to help Citibank sell its products, and it certainly isn’t going to help relieve the credit crisis. But that’s the kind of horse puckey that happens when marketeers convince top management that “branding” is vitally important.
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cliffordsfleas
If we were talking about branding of consumable products like soft drinks, chips, etc, I would imagine there might be more to gain. I have to agree that spending $400 million of bailout money on a logo sounds like terrible use of emergency funding.
It would be interesting to know what stadium this is and if the stadium was about to go under financially, etc, and if this was perhaps some form of a bailout from the bank to the stadium. How many people would have been affected in the region if the stadium closed. How does that offset an absurd looking expenditure of $400 million in emergency funding?
Either way, who bails out the banks next year when the people still can't pay their mortgages and we're still threatened with a possible collapse of our economic and housing systems? What about emergency funding for agriculture and crop development to there's food if we hit another depression and our currency can no longer purchase enough food to sustain us?
A little off topic but there are my thoughts on the matter.
Cliff
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SteveRider
Will you please stop equating advertising with branding. Yes, I agree it's a boneheaded waste of money. Call it image advertising, but to call it branding is a misinterpretation of what branding is.
Geoffrey James, Sales Machine
Quote from SteveRider: Will you please stop equating advertising with branding.
OK. Let's call it "promotional use of the brand name." Doesn't matter what you call it; the behavior comes out of the notion that marketing need not be measured quantitatively and objectively, with the metric tied to sales.
DotConnector
Hey, in this economy, if it doesn't track back
to increased return on investment, it should go
to the "nice-to-do-but-not-now" folder. Tax
dollars, or investor capital (same?), should
not be labeling stadiums or taking employees on
motivational junkets, i.e. AIG.
Geoffrey James
Geoffrey James has sold and written hundreds of features, articles and columns for national publications including Wired, Men's Health, Business 2.0, SellingPower, Brand World, Computer Gaming World, CIO, The New York Times and (of course) BNET. He is the author of seven books, including Business Wisdom of the Electronic Elite (translated into seven languages and selected by four book clubs), and The Tao of Programming (widely quoted on the Web as a "canonical book of... more »
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