US sports franchises ordinarily employ very sophisticated marketing ideas. However, the teams have all had to review these marketing methods because of the direct effects that the economic crisis has had on consumer spending. This has been manifested in the inability of sports franchises to fill up stadiums and get the sales for their products moving.
So it appears that sports team have had to devise new incentives to try and raise attendance at sports events and to raise the sales of merchandise. As Vincent Malozzi reports for the NYT here, the New Jersey Nets basketball franchise has started to offer ticket buyers free jerseys. It is trying to put together the jerseys as a compliment to the purchase of several tickets while allowing for the reversible jerseys to also bear the names of competing teams.
While the story does not mention what the relative prices of the jerseys and every seat are, it is understandable that the promotion of a competing team is not necessarily a loss. The reason being that a league is such that all teams have an interest in promoting the entire package even if they are competitors for the prizes. This means that even strong teams need the others I the franchise in order for the NBA to continue to thrive. Because it is really difficult to tell whether these initiatives will be the most effective, it would perhaps be better for the marketing teams in each franchise to devise different incentive schemes and adopt an experimental method for determining which is the most effective. The incentives scheme that presently exists cannot be fairly compared to an alternative and proved to be the better. But to my mind, it is clear that marketers are not applied economists.
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