WIRTZ-CASE SCENARIO
Cup in hand, Hawks owner looks to increase fan base — and ticket prices
BY MEG GRAHAM
Thirty-seven hours after the Chicago Blackhawks won the Stanley Cup, team owner Rocky Wirtz rolled through the Hyatt Regency doors with an orange tie, a yellow shirt and a smile that betrayed none of his exhaustion.
Since Monday’s win in Boston, Wirtz (an investor in Wrapports, the parent company of Grid and the Sun-Times) says he’s gotten little sleep and more congratulatory messages than he knows what to do with — a “couple hundred” texts and 150 emails (the senders of many are a mystery, he admits).
Six months after a prolonged player lockout had fans howling, Wirtz again has the hottest sports brand in town. And with both fans and advertisers jumping at the chance to be associated with a winner, business has never been better. “I think [the Cup] certainly helps with corporate sponsorships. It doesn’t hurt on the renewals. And obviously merchandise sales, and then just demand for tickets,” he said.
That demand is being driven in large part by the same type of young, city-dwelling fans who raucously filled city streets after the Blackhawks’ Stanley Cup-clinching victory Monday night. The owner says the Hawks have roped in the hard-to-understand millennial demographic without really knowing how.
“I don’t know why we have so many 20-somethings following our sport,” he said. “They’re discovering it, they’re talking about it, they’re watching it together, they’re meeting at their favorite watering holes to view it and to celebrate. I think it’s part of the whole lifestyle of what younger people are looking for.”
The team has courted other nontraditional hockey demographics as well. Wirtz says the Hawks have a 40 percent female fan base and plan to do more to speak to that group.
“We’re not properly marketing to enough women. Many times advertisers are looking at this as a ‘21- to 54-year-old male,’” he says. “We’ve gone a long way in knowing who our fan is, but we have a long way to go still.”
And just as winning smoothed things over with fans who were demanding an apology after the lockout, it’s likely to make next season’s 16 percent ticket hike easier to swallow. “We had the second-lowest ticket price in the league in ’07,” he says. “We knew we had to raise ticket prices but we had to do it very carefully. So much of our sport is derived from local revenue, unlike other sports that have very lucrative TV packages.”
Wirtz also believes that ticket prices won’t scare away season ticket holders, who can now regard their purchase as a safer investment. “If [season ticket holders] know they can get something for their ticket, [they’ll] invest the money upfront and still be able to make it back,” he said.
Wirtz is fine with one group getting squeezed out by higher ticket prices — the brawlers, whom he says he’s seen fewer of as ticket prices have risen and the makeup of the crowd at United Center has shifted from casual viewer to more upscale, serious fan.
“When the tickets didn’t have the same value or they didn’t look at the team as much, many times it would be an element of people who wanted to come to the United Center just to cause trouble and get in fights. We don’t have that. We do have occasional outburst, but generally speaking it’s a very good crowd.”