Sens face multi-faceted marketing challenge

Sure, it’s a little embarrassing to see empty seats at the Canadian Tire Centre when the Ottawa Senators are competing deep into May.

The question is, is this something uniquely related to the 2016-17 season? Or is there something more fundamental at play that must be addressed during the off-season?

The Senators, of course, have long been burdened by more difficult marketing challenges compared with Canada’s other six NHL franchises. Among them:

It’s the only NHL city with an arena well outside the downtown core. Team founder Bruce Firestone anticipated the sporting stadium would anchor a major new retail and housing development. The early team owners had also been confident that hightech companies would strongly support the franchise. However, politics scuttled the development scheme and the tech industry’s titan, Nortel Networks, went bankrupt, weakening the industry.

The Senators not only draw their fans from a small base — the capital region has just 1.2 million people — the potential pool of ticket buyers is further weakened by split loyalties. Significant swaths support either the Montreal Canadiens or Toronto Maple Leafs. This helps explain why Senators owner Eugene Melnyk charges less for arena seats than all other Canadian NHL team owners — and why relatively few fans sign up for the season.

An unusually high percentage of the region’s workforce is in government, which discourages its employees from accepting tickets from clients — a common practice in private companies.

Yet, despite all these negatives, the Senators not that many years ago were filling their arena most nights. The team was in the top half of the league for attendance.

Clearly, other factors are at play in 2017.

For government workers who do like their NHL hockey, it might be a simple matter of uncertainty related to their pay. Thousands of public servants experienced first-hand the botched introduction of the Phoenix project — the government’s attempt to upgrade pay systems across multiple departments.

Sports bars, offering free viewing of the games on highdefinition television, might also be draining away arena-goers. It’s possible, too, that the nature of the Senators’ playoff run, combined with their style of play, is at root. This team came out of nowhere, a group that included few household names who play a very conservative brand of hockey.

Consider, too, that the Senators must sell nearly 60 per cent of their 19,000 seats to people who aren’t season ticket holders. This requires a lot of effort, with the key sales going to corporations and other large groups. There wasn’t much time to pull the campaigns together, and some institutional memory had been lost because the Senators were shut out of last year’s playoffs.

Seen in this light, perhaps the team hasn’t done too bad. Even with the failure this year to sell out at least two of the Senators’ home playoff games, the team generated an estimated $3 million per game — roughly $27 million in spending residents of Ottawa and Gatineau hadn’t planned.

For Senators owner Eugene Melnyk, this extra revenue is a sweet bonus — one that could be put to good use sprucing up his team’s arena. Although Melnyk has reinvested sufficient capital to keep the Canadian Tire Centre up-to-date, it’s probably fair to say the general experience of the fan hasn’t changed a great deal over the past decade.

It might be time to change that.