What is the first or second thing you see when you think of a soccer team? That’s right, their logo. What does that represent for you? The entire club, or as in the case of FC Barcelona, maybe more than a club? Their famous tagline of “Mes que un club” is synonymous with their logo and their brand. But in my world, every club is more than just the club.
For me, a club represents the community in which it finds itself. Traditionally every soccer team came from a bunch of guys who worked together or were neighbors started playing against the guys at the other factory or the town next over. It quickly went from just a game to an event that was about local pride, us against them. It became more than a game, more than a club.
When I sat out to start what became Sarasota Paradise this was my starting point. It has to become more than a club. Knowing that the US has a very different relationship with its professional sports teams, how do you do that? Professional sports in the US is primarily an entertainment option for consumers. But there’s exceptions to this rule. When you look at lower division soccer you see some of the tribalism and pride that we’re used to from other parts of the world.
However, if you look at College sports, you se ALL OF IT. As someone who never attended college it’s a weird phenomenon. The passion Americans have for the college they went to, or the one in their home town, and the reverence they show players and coaches is akin to what I grew up with for soccer.
This means it is possible to create a passionate fan base for a professional sports team, and maybe easier for us who play at the lower level. But we need to be more than a club to achieve that. So how do you start? With the first thing you see…
Our process for creating our brand was intense but clear. The goal was to create a brand that encapsulates our city and its surrounding community. A brand that doesn’t exclude anyone. It needs to be something that can be seen as naturally a part of who we are here. Something new that has been here forever, buried inside of us, waiting to be released.
I’m happy to say that we achieved those things when creating the Sarasota Paradise brand. Thanks to a great process guided by Liam Murtaugh and his amazing design, we created something so good that it’s already been copied.
One of the things people comment about our brand is that it doesn’t say “soccer club” or “football club”. How will people know what you do if you don’t tell them!? These people all think they are experts, yet they’ve weirdly never build a big brand themselves…
There’s a couple of very important reasons why we do not have any SC or FC or a soccer ball in there. Besides that the last option would be extremely cheesy and ugly. If our goal is to encapsulate the entire community with our brand and not exclude anyone, how can we attain that by calling it soccer club? That per definition drives everyone who don’t like, or don’t know about the beautiful game away. Not a great strategy for a startup.
“We live in Paradise, you only visit.” Every year there are more than 3 million visitors to our community. I wanted a brand that would scream to tourists as they see our logo on things in the store: This represents your experience this week in Paradise. Would that be possible with a Soccer or Football on there?
In our now second year it is interesting that a majority of people in our community have heard about Sarasota Paradise or seen our brand. But far from everyone knows we are a soccer team. What does that tell you? No, it’s not that the “know-it-alls” were right. It actually proves them wrong.
Think about it for a second. How would the brand been able to spread to quickly to people who normally don’t watch the game? Because our brand is beautiful, it resonates with residents and visitors alike and it gets them curious. It latches on to their brains and gets stuck there. Now our job becomes to expand on that thing got into their brains and build out our brand from the inside out.
There’s a fair amount of psychology research done on this subject and how brand recognition trumps knowledge about the product. By a lot. It’s the reason why Coca-Cola spends billions on advertising every year. It’s why we have ads in the first place. It works.
And let’s be honest. If those 3 million visitors who come here every year buy our cool merchandise without knowing that we’re a soccer club, do I care? No, I don’t. Because we are more than a club. We Are Paradise.
MW
