A few years after starting his own business in his native Mississippi, Rodney Richardson was asked to help settle a vexing parochial matter.
“There’s a local high school, one of the bigger high schools in our market. They’re the Warriors,” Richardson said last week. “They wanted a little help, and they wanted to rebrand and wanted us to help out. … I said, ‘Do you guys, have you ever approached the local tribal council about this? Have you ever thought about that?’ They said, ‘You know, we haven’t, but if they wanted to do that, we’d be open to that.’ So we contacted the leadership of the local tribal council, who were very excited to be a part of the process. They had had some problems with the school in the past – not so much the namesake, but the way mascot looked, which was a caricature of a Native American. That’s the part they were unhappy with. They said, ‘We don’t have a problem with the name; we’d love to be a part of the process.’”
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Within a few weeks, Richardson – whose RARE Design agency has been in business for more than two decades, and whose first big job with RARE after years working in Nike’s Pro Teams Division with rebrands and designing new logos and team colors was with the launch of the NFL’s Houston Texans – had begun what he calls “an evolution” of the high school team’s identity. The difference, Richardson says, is that this time, the tribal council supported it.
“Even when the school unveiled the mark, the leaders of the council came to the unveil in tribal dress, and actually brought a costume for the mascot that they had created, for the guy who was going to be the mascot, that was authentic ceremonial attire,” Richardson said. “They put it on the guy up on stage. It was part of it; it was fully supported. Everybody worked through it. It was a great unveil, and it was fully supported by everybody in the community. Because they didn’t want to lose the heritage of that namesake, they wanted to do it the right way.”
There are distinct differences between a Mississippi town and Washington, D.C. But the biggest is the nickname of Washington’s football team. Love it, hate it, think it as a historical tribute to a once-proud franchise or a horrible slur against Native Americans, it polarizes, completely. There is no middle ground.
And as Washington’s owner, Daniel Snyder, decides on a new name for the franchise, as the team officially announced Monday morning would happen soon, the notion of how he arrives at a new name for his team is central.
The team had announced just a little more than a week ago that it would conduct a “thorough review” of the name, which has been in existence since the team moved from Boston to Washington in 1937. If a new name will be in place in the coming days or weeks, that would indicate, at best, an extremely fast process. NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell and coach Ron Rivera each said that they’ve spoken with Snyder about changing the name for the past few weeks.
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Yet even that time frame would be very, very fast compared with several teams in different leagues that have changed their names or logos in recent years. None, of course, had to deal with the implications of a name that has brought withering and endless criticism from multiple Native groups for more than four decades. Several marketing professionals and team representatives contacted this week all believed that months, rather than days, was the right way to go for any team looking to make such a major change.
“I think this presents an opportunity to reshape the football team’s brand in a bold new transformative way – new colors, new name, new symbolism, and I believe we may see this in the coming weeks,” said Tripp Donnelly, the CEO and founder of REQ, a D.C.-based digital marketing and brand management company. “As a native Washingtonian, I love our football team, so I hope and expect it appropriately retires the long-debated and controversial name and changes into something positive and aspirational for America’s capital city region, for passionate local fans, and to an interested national and global audience.”
When a team changes its name, it’s a huge physical undertaking. Everything in a stadium has to be changed; everything digitally has to be replaced — street signage around a ballpark or arena changes. There are, literally, thousands of items that need to be removed or altered, down to the color of the trash receptacles in your building. It is not something done well if it is done haphazardly or in a hurry.
Yet the name change itself is a relatively simple process: It doesn’t require a vote of league owners. Snyder will simply announce a new name, and given that he’s reportedly been in consultation with Goodell for the past few weeks on the issue, it’s not likely he’ll come up with something that Goodell would reject. But unilaterally changing the name in such a relatively short window is not the normal course of business with teams that have recently done so in different team sports.
“The trick is to come up with two or three, or four solid alternatives that capture the brand equity and build on the equity and then sort through the trademark issues and potential confusion issues with other teams,” said Allen Adamson, the co-founder of Metaforce, a branding and consulting firm, and an adjunct professor at NYU’s Stern School of Business.
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“It’s never a clear yes-no,” Adamson said. “This is a judgment call informed by doing some research and understanding how the name resonates with existing fans.”
The NBA’s Washington Wizards decided to change their name rather quickly, at the behest of their then-owner, the late Abe Pollin. He made the decision to change the team name from Bullets following the assassination of his friend, Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, on Nov. 4, 1995, saying the word’s connotation had become too associated with violence, both in D.C. and around the world.
But the process of changing the name took much longer.
The franchise had a “Name the Team” contest with fan submissions – more than half a million came in – and selected Wizards from five finalists chosen by a committee that included player Juwan Howard and the late WRC sports anchor George Michael and other local broadcasters, along with an executive from Boston Market, which sponsored the contest.
“We took (nearly) two years, but that was because we had no name in mind,” said Matt Williams, the Bullets’ vice president of communications at the time.
The process, which culminated with the selection of Wizards in May 1997, involved “everything, from coming up with the name, trademarking the name globally, which you need to do, and everything that comes with building the brand itself,” he said. “You have to put, usually, a team of graphic artists together to come up with a lot of different logo concepts to capture what you’re looking for. It’s not a willy-nilly thing. You may have a friend or a graphic person you trust, and you like the logo, and you name the team, and you go on. (But) we worked with the NBA exclusively. Their art team put together logos for us to review after we came up with the name, helped us with the trademark stuff. We were hand-in-hand with the NBA on all of that.”
The team narrowed the initial 3,000 non-redundant names submitted by fans to around 30 names “that we could trademark and weren’t obscene and were not the Capitals,” Williams said. The committee narrowed down the 30 to a final five: Wizards, Express, Dragons, Stallions and the very obscure, unloved Sea Dogs. Then, the team had a contest in which fans would call a 1-900 number and vote for one of the five finalists. The proceeds from the call went to an anti-violence campaign.
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“The whole idea was that this was going to be a big reveal,” Williams said. “The idea was that the public was going to make this decision.”
Another team’s executive, who was involved with changing his team’s name in recent years but who did not want to be identified in order to speak candidly about Washington’s situation, said that fan input should be a must as Snyder and the team look to change the name. Most sports leagues require an 18- to the 24-month runway before a team can officially change its name or primary logo, though it’s unclear if the NFL has the same time frame, given that so few teams change their names – and none under these circumstances.
“To me, the 18-month thing is legitimate, if not more,” the team executive said. “If you’re going to do it right, there’s an extensive amount of research and surveying that you want to conduct before you even start the process. You don’t want to make any changes based on anecdotal information. You have to have real data to make these decisions. It’s a big project with massive implications – not just from a brand standpoint, but potentially from a revenue standpoint: revenue, reputational and brand. If you can make data-driven decisions, you’re certainly going to put yourself in a much better position to be successful. The surveying process takes months alone. It was probably; I want to say it was in the 4-6-month range for us. We did multiple surveys. We wanted to make sure the data was accurate.
“In the Redskins’ case, they have, how many years of equity in that brand that’s already been built up, that’s been in place? And they’re also changing it for different reasons. You’re talking about confronting something that you feel is tied to systemic racism. That just adds another level of complexity to the whole thing. To me, that (data) insight would be more important than ever.”
The executive’s team sought some opinion from fans but stuck with more yes-or-no questions in its surveys to get more hard data.
“It sounds simple, but if you’re going to make a transition, you’re (first) looking at the colors,” he said. “If you can get something, some data relative to how they feel about the current colors and then maybe what you might transition into, the likelihood of coming up with something that’s going to resonate with fans is obviously a lot higher. In that market, there are some consistent colors that have worked. You might as well find out specifically which ones are the ones that connect the most with the fans.”
Taking time to decide on a new name also is central to re-establishing a team’s identity and connection to its community.
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Said Adamson: “The challenge here is that you need a distinctive name because the most important thing is that their fans feel that they’re special. And if it feels like a generic football team name, I think they’ll miss an opportunity. So my main advice is that even though there’s a storm now, take the time to explore all the options, take the time to think it through. Take the time to execute it really well. Don’t rush to print something. … Because if you do this right, it will last as long as the Yankees. If you do it wrong, you could make the change, but it could alienate lots of fans and people. It could become invisible.”
Adamson also offered this: A name change is not just a creative idea. It’s who the team aspires to be, what it wants to stand for, and what’s important for fans. Come up with something that captures that, and not just something to quiet your critics.
“The identity is the face of your brand,” said Richardson, the RARE Design CEO who has worked with dozens of professional and college teams over the years in rebranding new team names, logos, trademarks and colors.
“It’s the components that we create to express your brand, to express who you are,” he said. “Even taking a step back from identity, when we talk about brands or branding, when I say that word ‘brand,’ to me, that is synonymous with the word ‘story.’ Your brand is the story of who you are. Those stories about who you are, where you come from, your heritage, the things that impact your organization, and help shape you and your character and your values, those are the most impacting stories of all. That is the essence of your brand.
“… You think about it in terms of a person. You can think about someone that’s not in the room with you right now, and you think about them, and two things are gonna happen. One is, you have an emotional reaction to that person that you’re thinking about, whether you love ’em, hate ’em, like ’em, and what you know about their character, what you know about their personality. You have that kind of reaction to who you know they are. And then you also get this mental image in their head of what they look like: how they dress, how they do their hair, what their face looks like. That’s the identity. That emotional reaction is to the brand of who that person is, that story of who you know them to be.”
Richardson says the transient nature of teams, with people going in and out of organizations over some time, leaves teams vulnerable to making changes that might not necessarily reflect the distinctions of a particular region or city or the team’s history. And that knowledge of the city you’re in, and its history, is vital to picking a name.
“It’s really amazing how many people come to us, and they say, ‘We have forgotten who we are,’” Richardson said.
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“And teams can very easily lose an understanding of who they are,” he said. “Instead of that driving every decision they make, in terms of how they live that character out, and how they live out those values, they forget that. And that makes decision-making tremendously difficult. Because you end up in a stalemate: ‘What decision should we make?’ That’s what you have to rely on. Every decision an organization makes should get filtered through that brand, that story of who they are, so they continue to live that out. Let’s be this in the best way possible.”
Donnelly concurred.
“… A lot of times, people inside an organization will think they know what they represent to people, but they actually don’t go out and actually seek the information,” he said. “They don’t do the focus groups; they don’t do the surveys, very often getting that data back to actually understand what your audience is, and what your reach is. People will say, well, this just relates to the American football fans or in the D.C. region. It really doesn’t, right, because we now see American football, loved and watched around the world. So what does that project for Capital City, everything else, so they need to understand what their reach is of their audience? And I would argue that the American football, you know, NFL, American football and Washington Redskins have a global audience today. I hear about it because I travel a lot. I’ve got friends in London, friends in Europe, they know, they love the Washington Redskins.”
Richardson, who left Nike to go out on his own with RARE in 1999, worked with the then-New Orleans Hornets on their name and logo change to the Pelicans in 2012. The NBA had bought the Hornets’ franchise from its previous owners in 2010 to keep it from being sold to investors who might move the team out of the city. Less than two years later, the league sold the team to New Orleans Saints owner Tom Benson for $338 million, and the new owner wanted a new name for his new team.
“When we were working on that, and we had been working on the naming of that, Mr. Benson really liked the name ‘Pelicans,’” Richardson said. “That was his front-runner. Some people, when they heard about it, I thought, ‘What? Like, no way. We can’t name an NBA team that. I said, ‘Why?’ And he started going into it. I mean, I knew, growing up in south Mississippi, over there in Macomb, just 20 miles north of the Louisiana line, and New Orleans was the closest big city to us growing up, being familiar with the Pelican State, and recognizing the Brown Pelican. I mean, there were a lot of distinctions that we learned about it as we were doing the research. When we started digging into it and recognizing the connection of that name to that region. … Post-(Hurricane) Katrina, that bird is considered a symbol of light. It’s a survivor. It’s a thriver, in the harshest conditions. It’s a symbol of overcoming. It’s been used by missionaries and people throughout all cultures to convey that kind of thriving.
“Even on the Louisiana flag, there’s a Pelican with her wings wrapped around her young. And she’s pricking at her own breast to drain blood to feed her young. And it’s a symbol of survival. The BP oil spill, and post-Katrina, and you have this rallying identity, this rallying totem that can represent the city in the midst of that – not just surviving, but thriving and overcoming, and you told that story through the brand, people thought, ‘Yes, yes, that does represent who we are; that doesn’t belong to anybody else; that belongs to us, that resonates with us.’ And they really liked it.”
Less than a year later, the team announced it would change from Hornets to Pelicans, along with changing its colors from teal, purple, gold and white to blue, gold and red – along, obviously, with the logo.
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“So now that you know that story, when we created the identity, the city name is larger than the team moniker. That was intentional,” Richardson said. “Because, if you remember, at that time, there were lots of threats – ‘are they going to move, is the team going to be in New Orleans or not?’ He wanted that to be a statement of the commitment for that team to stay in New Orleans, and the way we put the city name on the back of the bird, that’s that symbol, this symbol that’s carrying us, the spirit of thriving carries this city. When we’re designing the mark, designing the identity, there are storytelling components built into it so that the team can tell those stories in a way, and tell them consistently so that they can resonate with people.”
And, sometimes, fan input surprises a team.
When the NBA’s Vancouver Grizzlies moved to Memphis in 2001, the expectation was, along with the new city, the team would soon have a new nickname. The team’s owner at the time, the late Michael Heisley, didn’t really care one way or another what his team would be called after it arrived in Tennessee.
“Grizzly bears in British Columbia – check. Grizzly bears in Memphis – no,” recalled Andy Dolich, the team’s president of business operations at the time. “I don’t even think they have them at the zoo, to be honest with you.”
There were any number of cultural touchstones in the city known both for rhythm and blues and Elvis Presley that the team could have adopted. Fans suggested the name Qs — as in barbeque. They suggested the Elvii. The Big Muddies. The Hound Dogs. And so on. But when the Grizzlies did focus group research of Memphis-area residents and sponsors, they found people were so excited about an NBA team coming to town, they didn’t really care if the team kept the original name.
“It was so astounding,” Dolich said. “It was easily in the 80 percent of people that said, ‘We’ll take the name ‘Grizzlies.’ Because it’s ours. It’s ours.’… And then, it was like, ‘Well, we should maybe create a backstory.’” And thus, Memphians were soon introduced to the Legend of the Blue Bear.
“Which was completely made out of the ozone,” Dolich said.
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But, it stuck. Heisley sold the locals at lunches and dinners. The team’s first mascot, Grizz, made appearances everywhere around town, including at the city’s iconic St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital – where the team also bankrolled the construction of a long-term housing unit near the hospital grounds for families who had just been informed that their kids would require long-term hospitalization and needed a place to stay and recalibrate for a few days rather than looking for a nearby hotel, which had been the previous custom.
“Mike really did such an amazing job in helping us,” Dolich said. “He was a born salesman. That’s how he made his money. … The people in the community really liked him. Because he was real. And in a smaller community, you’ve got to be real.”
Will it make sense for Washington to try and change its name in time for next season – assuming there is a next season that starts somewhere close to on time? Can Snyder get this done in time for Week 1, as Rivera told The Washington Post last week would be his preference?
“Could they tackle this?” Donnelly asked. “I believe they could because they likely have been collecting all sorts of (data) on the TV side, digital side, social media side.”
The team executive, though, had his doubts.
“I guess you can expedite anything, but I don’t see how you can do it,” he said. “It depends on how extensive it is. If you’re talking about a complete rebrand, and it’s simply not just the name, it’s not simply the logo; it could potentially be the colors and every other design aspect. I don’t know how you can do that before (the season). Unless they were already down the road on something, I don’t know how you pull it off before the season starts. I personally wouldn’t. What I would do is I would commit to it, that this is a process we’re going to undertake. I would be very transparent about what the process is. And I would target it for next year … unless they felt that the political implications are so great that they weren’t able to navigate that.”
There are already many rumored replacement names: RedTails and RedWolves and Warriors, among others. But, to buy himself more time – to road-test possible replacement names further – the marketers said that Snyder could, essentially, have his team go nickname-less for 2020, and just go by “Washington” on scoreboards and in the standings.
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“No way around it; it’s awkward when you know you’re going to change the name and leverage that last year,” the team executive said. “But it gives you a chance to get people invested, liquidate some things. If you want to find a way to celebrate some of the history, you can celebrate some of the history, and then people know at some point that there’s going to be this clean break, and you’re going to roll the whole thing out. …You want to be really deliberate how you roll this stuff out. There are big implications. It’s really a good way to get people on board. There’s revenue opportunities.”
Speaking of that: What about the old merchandise? The tens of thousands of jerseys and hats and jackets with the old name and logo? What happens to that stuff?
“Merchandise is a double-edged sword,” said The Athletic’s business reporter, Dan Kaplan. “Yes, a new team name and logo means a whole slate of new merchandise, and the opportunity to market to younger fans. It’s no different in a sense than Tampa having new Tom Brady jerseys to sell. But what to do with all those historic jerseys from Theismann to Riggins to the Hogs? That’s big business for any long-standing team, does that simply get eliminated from the ledger? And if the team logo is considered racist, are fans of the team who show up in the old gear turned away at the gate?”
The team executive said there is a “ton” of equity in the old brand.
“I’ve got to believe there would be a lot of people interested in the historic nature of it,” he said. “But is that where you really want to go? … What throwback, what legacy brands are out there that would fall under the same category as a brand, like the Redskins and Indians? That one, I haven’t even thought about. Everyone is focusing on the current team names; what are people buying and wearing, and what are teams leveraging in their history, that maybe isn’t appropriate anymore? I think, in the situation that they’re in, you’re going to have to have a clean break.”
Richardson said the team would have to work hand in hand with Nike, the NFL’s official uniform manufacturer. The Athletic reported last week that Nike was pulling all merchandise with the current name off its shelves until the team changes its name.
“Decisions (normally) have to be made a year out or more for a season to get your full line of product,” he said. “If you went down to the bare bones and pushed it to the last minute, you might be a little less a year, but not by much. The manufacturing timelines are so far out. If they were trying to get product made for this season to be on the retail shelves, I don’t know how in the world they could do uniforms or anything that’s authentic apparel, that’s sideline apparel, things like that. If Nike or any athletic manufacturer was willing to do that, yes: you could be ‘Washington football;’ you could be ‘District Football;’ you could do ‘D.C. Football’. You could do those things and drop the moniker from it. There’s still certain apparel that would not be available this season because they couldn’t turn it around that quickly.
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“… The stuff that you think of, practice apparel, tees, caps, things that you could turn very quickly, those, probably. A lot of custom-built stuff would be difficult. It depends how much they put on there. If the apparel design itself, the body, the construct of it, of the silhouette, doesn’t change, and they just didn’t put ‘Redskins,’ for instance, if they just put ‘Washington’ on it, they might be able to make that adjustment. If colors don’t change. If it’s just a matter of trying to replace that totem, that moniker, probably – and if the manufacturer would be to do what they could to help the team with that, there’s probably a good bet that that could happen.”
Whatever Snyder decides, and whenever he decides it, the choice will resonate in town long after he no longer owns the team. It might be one of his last, best chances to reverse more than two decades of dysfunction and disillusionment among what used to be one of sports’ best and most ardent fan bases.
“Name change is easy,” Adamson said. “Doing it really well and capturing an emotion distinctively is hard. If you build it right, it will last. If you knee-jerk, you’ll end up with a different problem, and in (just) a couple years: You changed it and no one cares.”
(Photo: Scott Taetsch/Getty Images)