TOUGH SELL?
Club execs face challenge of marketing a rebuilding team.
Gretchen Sheirr walked out to the Toyota Center floor, the court down, stands in place and lights on as if tip-off for her first season as Rockets president of business operations was moments away. It is rare in the quietest part of the NBA calendar for an arena to be dressed up for a game, but there had been a select-a-seat event days earlier and the new lighting for games was being tested. At that moment, however, even without a player or basketball in sight, it was easy to picture the crowds again in place, a corner turned. Rebuilding is not just about adding young prospects and collecting draft picks. For the Rockets, it is very much about the work in the offices on the other end of Toyota Center, where Sheirr and Julian Duncan, the team’s new chief marketing and strategy officer, plot strategies to sell the plan, the latest area in which the Rockets are nearly starting over.
“Everyone is really excited,” Sheirr said. “Our fans are excited. Our team is excited. This will be the first time we’ll get to welcome fans back at a capacity level and we’ll get to introduce them to new players and a new experience.”
For Sheirr, who was promoted to team president in May, and Duncan, who in July returned to his hometown after jobs with Nike, Under Armor and the NFL’s Jacksonville Jaguars, there already was a need to start over and with it, take a fresh look at things.
The circumstances of the product they are selling, with the Rockets coming off a season in which they went from years of being considered championship contenders to the worst record in the NBA and in franchise history, would have forced that.
There are advantages in the timing. The disappointment that might have come from the fall from a star-filled to rebuilding roster was last season, when teams could not sell many tickets, anyway. A season later, fans and customers have had no choice but to accept where the Rockets find themselves in the process.
With the shift of storylines from those departing to the players that have been brought in to replace them, there is now a need to introduce players that could be a part of whatever is built and for Sheirr and Duncan to sell a very different product.
“It is a fresh start for everything,” Sheirr said. “That’s a fresh start for me, it’s a fresh start for Julian. It’s going to be a fresh start for our fans and our season-ticket holders as well.”
The Rockets have no choice but to rewrite their messaging. But in other ways, the entire league is at least to some degree starting over in sales.
Sales always begin with renewals of the previous season’s ticket holders. The Rockets’ average home attendance of 3,177 last season was the third-largest in the
NBA. But if every season-ticket holder renewed their tickets there would still be a long way to fill the arena.
Season-ticket holders were given the option to “pause” their membership from the 2019-20 season, allowing renewals to be not just from last season but from before the COVID protocols’ social distancing led to limited attendance. But in addition to finding other things to do and ways to spend their money, customers then were buying into a very different team.
Sheirr would share no specifics about sales. Asked how sales are going, she said, “It’s going.”
The NBA is still finalizing protocols for fans, but there is an expectation that proof of vaccination or negative tests will be required within some distance from the court, as it was for fans on the floor level last season.
Chicago’s United Center announced that spectators in all events will be required to show negative test results or be fully vaccinated. Concerts in Toyota Center have had varying requirements, from Harry Styles’ concert requiring fans to be fully vaccinated or produce a negative test to no such requirements for Eric Clapton days later.
“We’re considering everything,” Sheirr said.
Her predecessor, Tad Brown, in recent seasons did guarantee the Rockets would sell out every game, putting Sheirr on the spot.
“I’m not going to make that the goal this year,” she said.
“On the flip side,” Duncan said, “the engagement that we’re getting on social media is through the roof right now. Coming off summer league, incredible engagement across all our platforms with the content we’ve created, introducing our new players to the fan base. And if we’re doing our jobs well, we’re taking that interest and we’re turning it into relationships that will help renewals as we move forward.
“We’re having a lot of fun kind of digging in. We’re really encouraged by the engagement that we’re getting with our fans. It’s showing that our fans are truly interested in what we’re doing here and what we’re building here.”
There will be a new public address announce,r with Matt Thomas to handle radio play-by-play for all games, rather than just road games as he had in past seasons. Craig Ackerman will do the television broadcasts home and away now that Bill Worrell has retired after several seasons doing the home games. AT&T SportsNet is “close” to announcing a new analyst to replace Matt Bullard, who moved into the Rockets’ front office.
Borrowing from the setup on the floor level last season, “loge boxes” will be added in the corners at Toyota Center. There is new lighting in the arena. The Credit Karma Money uniform sponsorship patch has been redesigned since it was unveiled in time for the draft and summer league to better match with the uniforms as a whole.
Some changes to game presentation are also in the works.
“Gretchen’s challenged me and given me permission as the marketing dude to take a look at everything we’ve done and assess, ‘Hey, how can we continue to do the things that have made us great and make it even better,’ from game pres to social/digital,” Duncan said. “We are going to have our fans back in the building and engaging with us en masse in a long time. We don’t want it to feel old.
“There’s definitely going to be a lot experimenting and a lot of new, fresh ideas that are coming up. It’s a little bit premature.”
Still, success in the ticket office, where Sheirr moved up the Rockets’ business side ladder including stints as vice president of sales, chief revenue officer and chief operating officer before her most recent promotion, is most closely tied to success on the court.
As much as the Rockets are encouraged by engagement with social media documentaries, starting with profiles of Jae’Sean Tate, Kevin Porter Jr. and coach Stephen Silas, and even the start of a Rockets ROKU channel, no amount of messaging can replace winning games.
Sheirr’s two decades with the team does include experience with losing seasons. Her first season, as senior director of ticket sales, saw the Rockets go 28-54 and win the lottery to draft Yao Ming. That season, like last season, was greatly diminished by a rash of injuries. The lottery luck to get Yao was not unlike the good fortune this year to remain in the top four, rather than lose the pick to Oklahoma City, and to draft guard Jalen Green.
“I think you take something from every experience,” Sheirr said. “The thing I learned from this business is you can’t control any of it. You have to be flexible. You got to hope for best-case scenario, but you have to be prepared for everything. There’s definitely a lot of similarities.
“There’s franchises that go through really, really hard times for a really long period of time and they never get that player in the draft. I don’t want to put that pressure on Jalen. He is a young, 19year-old kid who has played a handful of summer league games. But he certainly is ready for his next step. It’s going to be really fun. Hopefully, fans have a really good time watching them grow.
“That’s an experience our fans have not had in a really long time. Yao was the last time we had a draft pick this high. He was an amazing player and an even better human being. People really enjoyed his journey because they got to know him from the moment he stepped foot in the NBA. Our fans have not had a chance to do that in a really long time. We think they’re ready for it.”
When Sheirr, 43, started with the Rockets, Duncan, 44, was starting at defensive end for the Rhein Fire, the NFL Europe team in Dusseldorf, Germany. An Aldine Nimitz graduate, he played for Rice and would return after his playing career to earn his MBA from Rice’s Jones Graduate School of Business in 2006.
Duncan’s title is new to the organization, reflecting the change to have him lead marketing efforts previously handled by the head of marketing but also much of the business strategy and development that Sheirr handled previously.
“This is a very innovative and unique approach to business, the way Gretchen has laid the vision out,” Duncan said. “It really takes advantage of and maximizes the things I had an opportunity to build up across my career, the big brand background from Nike and Under Armor, the sports background and event marketing background I had with the Jacksonville Jaguars. To bring it all to bear, is innovative and also just fun.”
There is also a hope that new customers, rather than returning ticket holders, are likely to become long-term customers. That also could fit with the change in the makeup of the team.
“It’s getting them invested in this new team also bringing in younger fans into this game,” Sheirr said. “These kids are 19 years old. They are really savvy in social media. They reach an audience. As great as our former players were, it is a different audience. It is a different generation. They consume basketball in a different way. That’s going to open up a lot of doors and a lot of things that we can do. It’s going to be young and fresh and exciting and a little bit different from what folks are used to.
“Certainly, Rafael (Stone, the Rockets general manager) and coach want really good players. I want really fun and marketable players. And luckily, we got both.”
While Silas and Stone seek to turn a rebuilt roster into a winning record, Sheirr and Duncan will attempt to sell that message and a chance to see it happen. If last season marked the end of what had been, this is the start of something new, not just on the court, but for the front office.