| Moment Home Page | Current Article Index | Search | Back Issues |



3COM or Candlestick? The Arena Name Game

by Vaibhav Mangrulkar

For a long time, perhaps since the days when athletes first acquired a sense of jealously and wants, sports have always been called a "business." Players have, for the past decade, been persuaded to change teams because huge attractive contracts. Now, some professional sports stadium are even venturing into this philosophy of selling off.

Last year, the bustling network peripheral company, 3Com, bought the name of the fabled Candlestick Park and renamed it 3Com Park. That doesn't have that same friendly feeling to it anymore, does it?

Some say that 3Com has altruistic motives in its purchase of the former Candlestick Park and this somewhat cacophonous name has currently benefited both sides of the deal.

3Com's sales total more than $1.3 billion, and it is one of the world's fastest growing and largest data networking companies.

Moreover, it is the first high technology company to acquire the rights to name a professional sports stadium in the United States. "A perfect fit for the people of the Bay Area," says Carmen Policy, president of the San Francisco Forty-Niners, and truly so.

3Com Park will be the site for the NFL Superbowl in 1999, and to prepare for this event, the city of San Francisco needed someone to help defray the $35 million renovation costs. 3Com stepped in, promised, and delivered even more than the city expected.

Currently, the stadium is fully networked, with access to the World Wide Web and other Internet facilities at various booths. Now fans can see Jerry Rice diving for Steve Young's bullet pass via smooth MPEG animation on the 'Net.


The new 3COM Park Logo
Generous and selfless motives are not new for 3Com, however. In September 1995, 3Com was honored for its success in linking K-12 grade schools to the Internet in Santa Clara and for its work in driving the Silicon Valley Smart Valley Inc. teleworking and education projects.

Also, in 1992, 3Com received the President's Environment and Conservation Challenge Award, the United States' highest honor, for its environmental quality management and for pioneering CFC-free manufacturing.

Following suit in early January, Continental Airlines bought the name of the former Brendan Byrne Arena in East Rutherford, New Jersey, perhaps by watching the success story of Candlestick Park's facelift.

These name changes bring about a theory on why this trend occurs: the market in sports entertainment is so large that a company could suddenly attract a large audience when its name is noticed on the building of one's favorite team.

A company also gets free advertising when a sportscaster mentions where the sports venue is taking place, even though that person was not paid to say the company's name and does not even want to say the company's name.

Furthermore, a sponsorship in this nature also guarantees hard-to-get tickets for the company, to be given to special, important clients.

The Sports Marketing Group of Dallas said that a "friendlier, non-corporate image also emerges for companies who follow this trend." Moreover, "unique programs and strategies to maximize their investments [like this] are a big plus."

In the past, many companies have sponsored college sports events, such as CompUSA's Florida Citrus Bowl. A company that sponsors a sports event instantly gets coverage by sports magazines, by the sports section in newspapers, and by announcers at the games.

Strangely, many major companies are basically missing-in-action in this name game venture. Microsoft sponsored the Superbowl by helping to create a Web page at superbowl.com and by giving money to make the big game even better.

But for a company like Microsoft, can a stadium name be upcoming? If a company like 3Com could do it, I'm sure larger companies like Microsoft, once they understand the huge value in such a venture, can definitely buy a name.

In the future, you may bear witness to such ballparks like Microsoft Stadium and IBM Arena. For companies like these that have a solid base and want to woo some sports fans who are unfamiliar with computer technology, sponsoring a sporting event is the perfect thing to remove the image of the "faceless corporate entity" and to show that it can give money to its community ballpark.

For the smaller companies, sponsorship is a great way of introducing themselves to thousands of sportsfans, or should I say, potential customers?


3Com Corp.
3Com Park Official Home Page
Look Who's Talking About 3Com Park
Mindsphere WebDesign: 3Com Park Kiosk


| Moment Home Page | Current Article Index | Search | Back Issues |