Or how the name of the bowl game a company sponsors affects the value of their sponsorship, and why a stupid name for a bowl game might be better.

MITCHELL BLATT, sports business

Every year when the bowl season starts out with two 7-5 teams playing each other in the Meineke Car Care Bowl, or some other cheaply-named bowl game, there are the jokes about how there are too many bowl games.

“Hey, the Hoosiers deserve to play in the Toilet Bowl this year!”
(For more on some of the less prestigious bowl games, read our interview with the promoters of the EagleBank Bowl.)

Some of the early bowl games have particularly cumbersome names:
S.D. County Credit Union Poinsettia Bowl, R+L Carriers New Orleans Bowl, St. Petersburg Bowl pres. by Beef ‘O’ Brady’s, and of course the PapaJohns.com Bowl (not the Pizza Bowl).

But for an early bowl game that no one watches, having a stupid name can be a good thing, maybe even a better value than sponsoring a big name bowl.

For example, let me ask you who sponsors the Rose Bowl?

Stumped?

It’s Citi.

I bet you didn’t need to think for a second to know who sponsors the PapaJohns.com Bowl.

When that bowl gets written about, the sponsor itself is the name of the bowl. That bowl game does seem to stick out to me whenever I read it just because it is such a lame name. Not only is it named exclusively after a sponsor, it’s named after the sponsor’s website! So even if I never watch it, Papa Johns does get brand name penetration with me.

(As for the Rose Bowl, the official name is The Rose Bowl Game presented by Citi. Allstate and Tostitos and FedEx will get more brand penetration with the Sugar, Fiesta, and Orange bowls, respectively, because their names precede their bowl games, so they won’t be dropped in media coverage. Tostitos has the best bang for their buck, because they sponsored a game that relates to their product: Tostitos Fiesta.)

The brand penetration that comes from sponsoring an event comes not just from the event itself, but from the media preceding the event, when people are talking about who will win the FedEx Orange Bowl, for example.

However, most fans aren’t going to refer to the Orange Bowl as the FedEx Orange Bowl, but the media might. As with Papa Johns, here are some other companies that decided to sponsor a bowl game named exclusively after the sponsor:
Little Caesars, EagleBank, Chick-fil-A, Capital One, GMAC, Insight, Outback.

The Insight Bowl and Outback Bowl even manage to not sound tacky, but with the Insight Bowl, I’d question whether some people recognize immediately that it is sponsored by Insight Enterprises, because it does sound like it could be the name of a bowl game itself. That would dull name penetration, if they didn’t.

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