When it comes to naming, too many cooks make a mammoth mess!
A Mammoth Name
Utah’s new hockey team name is a great reminder that public polls can give you attention, but they rarely give you great names. Here’s what happens when strategy takes a back seat to spectacle.
This video originally appeared in LinkedIn.
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TRANSCRIPT:
Hey guys, it’s Rebeca with BrandTrue and I want to talk about a sports team name. I love to cover these when they change names especially, I’ve talked about it a lot. Usually these name changes we’ve been seeing in the last five years or so have been spurred on by racist overtones of legacy names. This name is not that. A team called the Arizona Coyotes was purchased and moved to Salt Lake, so they needed a new name.
Okay… the team has gone about this all wrong. The management, they decided to get community input. That’s awesome. But I think that the right way to get community input, whether it’s, you know, an entire city region, or whether it’s a group of consumers or even employees The way you want to do this, people, is you narrow it down to three strong options, all of which you could live with, all of which are strategically sound. And you get people’s input on those. You don’t start with a blank state.
So they’ve named it Mammoth. Now, I don’t think this is the smartest thing either. In Utah, they have fossils of wooly mammoths, the extinct, prehistoric animal. Great, but they’re mammothS. Guess what? Their logo has like the tusks. So why are they called Mammoth? Like meaning very large. So that’s another thing they did wrong, but not even the main point.
This team, they started with a blank slate and the process took them 13 months and four rounds of surveys of the whole community. I think that was obviously a waste of money. It was a huge waste of time. They were called the Utah Hockey Team in between while they were waiting to work it out. Just awful. And I don’t think that it inspires confidence. I think it’s great to get people’s buy-in for something like that, but not that way. So, don’t do that. If you name things, don’t ask everyone. That’s all. That’s what I wanted to share with you. Thanks. Bye!
