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Bank Buyouts Raise Question Of Names For Venues
NASHVILLE (Billboard) - Performance venues love blockbuster events, but not the kind that are currently affecting their naming-rights partners.
The stunning takeovers of big banks like Washington Mutual (WaMu) and Wachovia are forcing venues with long-term naming-rights deals with these institutions to grapple with unexpected branding challenges. Some even face the prospect of losing a partner at a time when replacing one lucrative naming-rights deal with another could be a difficult task at best.
The WaMu Theater at Madison Square Garden in New York, the WaMu Theater at Qwest Field in Seattle, the Wachovia Center in Philadelphia and the Wachovia Arena in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, are among the venues being forced to deal with the fallout of the U.S. financial crisis.
Mergers, acquisitions and takeovers are nothing new, so name changes have become relatively common in this age of widespread corporate branding of venues. But millions of dollars are spent positioning and branding arenas and theaters, so a name change creates unwanted headaches.
"It's a difficult situation," said Bob Cavalieri, senior vice president of business development for Philadelphia-based facility management firm SMG, which runs the Wachovia Arena in Wilkes-Barre. "Any time you take a brand, an identity, and you change that identity, you cause confusion amongst the public. You really have to start spending some money to change the brand in consumers' minds."
MILLION-DOLLAR TAB
For the Wachovia Center in Philadelphia, rebranding has become old hat. The building opened as the CoreStates Center in 1995 in a 29-year naming-rights deal that brings in an estimated $3 million per year in fees. CoreStates became the First Union Center in 1998 before being renamed Wachovia Center in 2003.
Branding efforts related to the name changes have cost about $1 million each time, with the tab picked up by the banks that acquired the naming assets, according to Peter Luukko, president of Comcast-Spectacor, the Philadelphia-based management firm that runs the Wachovia Center.
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Keywords:
wachovia center venues namingrights change wamu branding time name runs brand firm million changes corestates identity theater philadelphia arena wilkesbarre difficult management president banks
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