Public Relations Strategies and a Struggling NBA Franchise

Presented by Ray Artique Sr., APR, senior vice president, NBA Phoenix Suns by Adam Freestone

Ray Artigue, the senior vice president of Public Relations for the Phoenix Suns, explained the plan he and his fellow public relations professionals came up with to maintain market share in one of the nation's most competitive sports. The Phoenix Suns were a struggling NBA franchise and public relations played an integral role in the team's struggle to stay in the loop. The first step Artigue and his co-workers took was to do a situational analysis.


There are many reasons why the Phoenix Suns are not as popular as they were four years ago. For starters the NBA is down, fans are down, merchandise is down and ticket prices are up. The Suns used to be the No. 1 franchise in Phoenix and no longer are. The main reason for this is that there are five other major sports teams in Phoenix to compete with. Last year the Suns averaged 3,500-4,500 empty seats per game. The Suns only renewed 65 percent of season ticket holders, and lost 35 percent of their core audience. Artigue and his co-workers generated a list of objectives that they wanted to reach by the following season.

The main objective was to stop losing customers/fans and to regain the position as the No. 1 spoils team in Phoenix. They felt they had to rebuild their relationship with the public, retain 90 percent of season ticket holders and obtain $5 million in new sales. In addition to this, Artigue and his co-workers felt that the entire Phoenix Suns basketball program needed to become a more contemporary, energetic sports franchise with a more fan-friendly environment.

The public relations staff came up with five major strategies to turn the Phoenix Suns program around. First, staff members wanted to create an easy, open dialogue with fans. Second, they needed to invite new fans to get on board. In addition to this, they felt that the entire program needed to let its hair down and be edgy to appeal to the next generation of fans. And finally they needed the media to be allies with them to help them get the message out, so they told the media about all of their strategies.

The tactics that Artigue and his co-workers came up with were excellent according to newspapers all over Arizona. They kicked the summer off with a promotional camp where several of the Phoenix Suns players taught kids from all over the country the basics of basketball. They contacted the media, stated their objective and were bold about it: "We know we have work to do; you tell us what we need to do." "You talk it, we'll walk it." They began to put this objective on sidewalks with chalk, on door hangers in buildings where opinion leaders worked and on billboards hoping the newspapers would write about it.


Artigue said their best tactic was a new web site they created; everyeffort.net (e-squared on hats and shirts.) They wanted fans to tell them what they wanted the Suns to do to win them back. On the new web site they received thousands of responses, "It was like the worlds biggest focus group." People commented on trades, ticket prices, food prices, programs, events and access to players. The PR department tried to take everything the fans said on the web site into consideration.

They made new deals with tickets. You could buy six, 10 and 20 packs of tickets for as low as $10 a ticket. They also used some of the comments fans made that were funny or cute and used them in 30 and 60 second television spots that will run in October 2003. The fans wanted to see owner Jerry Colandgio out of his Armani suits for once, so they showed him getting his hair done in cornrows. They had other funny commercials like Damon Stoudemire, starting point-guard, camping with Boy Scouts and not being able to fit in the tent, and Shawn Marion, starting power-forward, losing to kids in a basketball game.

Artigue closed by saying, "Before we came up with a new PR campaign our customer service department consisted of five people, and now we get so many calls and new ticket buyers, we had to hire 15 more people in customer service alone. It goes to show you that good strategic PR thinking will create a good plan."


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