How The Vegas Golden Knights Saved A Marriage and Parlayed Fan Emotions Into Revenues In Quest For Global Sales
By Alan Snel of LVSportsBiz.com
My all-time favorite Vegas Golden Knights story has nothing to do with a game or play or something bought or sold. It’s a story that VGK President Kerry Bubolz told when he was quite the popular lunch speaker during Year 1 when the first-year band of hockey misfits made a miraculous run to the Stanley Cup Final.
The story, as told by Bubolz, went like this: A married couple was having relationship troubles and their marriage was on the rocks. But husband and wife renewed their love thanks to the common bond of rooting for the Golden Knights during that extraordinary, once-a-lifetime inaugural season.
“We even save marriages,” Bubolz joked at the time.
But behind every joke there’s a strand of humor that creates the laugh or nod and the fact is the Golden Knights and their brand have created the type of intense brand loyalty that you don’t see often in major league sports. Don’t get me wrong. All expansion teams have honeymoon periods of packed venues and first-year merchandise sales.
Depending on the market, things can then go sideways quickly. I recall attending the second game ever of the Tampa Bay Devil Rays, a team based in St. Petersburg, Florida. The first season went well with packed crowds at a horrible domed baseball park in 1998. But then attendance plummeted and the Rays might actually split their season between St. Petersburg and Montreal because the Tampa Bay market won’t publicly subsidize a new ballpark.
From a business standpoint, the Golden Knights’ ability to generate so much merchandise and ticket sales from a brand that has no roots to the history, geography or weather of Southern Nevada is a remarkable marketing lesson that should be taught in every sports marketing 101 class across the USA.
The Golden Knights? Las Vegas was a western horse town, then a gambling town when gambling was legalized in 1931. Medieval times were not exactly part of the desert DNA or lifestyle, unless you want to count Scotty’s Castle in Death Valley, which is not really a castle and a three-hour car ride away from Las Vegas.
While Arizona went for a local animal like a Coyote, and Tampa Bay was inspired by its local electrical storms to come up with Lightning, Golden Knights owner Bill Foley did not have any historic or geographic Las Vegas element in mind when he came up with Golden Knights. Instead, the 1967 U.S. Military Academy at West Point graduate was inspired by West Point’s “Black Knights” sports team name that would morph into the Golden Knights in an announcement nearly four years ago on Nov. 22, 2016.
VGK merchandise and jersey sales were a hit, Top 5 revenue sales material that led to long lines of Golden Knights fans on “Gold Friday,” the day after Thanksgiving when the VGK held holiday sales to peddle everything from Golden Knights-theme bicycles to goaltender Marc-Andre Fleury’s glove and blocker set.
In an interview with LVSportsBiz.com three years ago, Foley said he wanted to make the Golden Knights a global brand.
Foley said the knight brand can have international appeal and he was counting on tapping many of the international visitors flowing into the Las Vegas market every year. He wanted people in Shanghai, for example, to wear his team’s jersey after visiting Las Vegas.
The Golden Knights’ desire to be a global sports brand was not just talk. In April 2019, the Las Vegas-based franchise launched an an international fan club called, “VGK Worldwide.” Membership is $120 for anyone on earth to join the VGK club, which includes swag like ballcaps, T-shirts and Las Vegas-style gambling artifacts like playing cards and poker chips. Last year, fans in more than 110 countries had purchased licensed VGK logo gear, according to Fanatics.
But how have the Golden Knights sold so much licensed logo gear when the brand and crest have no intrinsic historic, geographic or cultural connection to Las Vegas? To figure that out, I went back to one of my old college freshman books called, Decoding Advertisements, by Judith Williamson. It’s a book from my freshman course called, “American Cultural Artifacts.”
Williamson put forth a simple concept that marketing’s trick is to get the consumer to associate a set of emotional feelings with the product — which is exactly why a fan can justify buying a VGK jersey for $200.
The emotions of season one, when the Golden Knights were the first ever major league team in the growing Las Vegas market, are still being parlayed into merchandise sales.
Interestingly enough, before Foley revealed four years ago that “Golden Knights” was the franchise name, MGM Resorts International — a major VGK sponsor — was hoping “Aces” would be the NHL team name as a nod to Las Vegas’ gaming culture. After the Golden Knights name was picked, MGM Resorts ended up using Aces for its WNBA property, the new Las Vegas Aces that were re-branded after MGM Resorts purchased the former WNBA San Antonio franchise and revealed the Aces logo in December 2017.
Speaking of San Antonio, Foley said in February 2020 that the Golden Knights had purchased the San Antonio Rampage of the American Hockey League and planned to move the AHL team to Henderson. The team was re-branded into the Silver Knights. Check out the Silver Knights jersey, which starts at $129.99 plus the VGK “third” jersey which is a gold jersey.
And Foley, who once said the public money being used to build the Raiders’ new palatial stadium could have been better used on public needs, was happy to receive public financial assistance to help build the new Lifeguard Arena community ice center in downtown Henderson that will serve as the Henderson Silver Knights training center and the new 6,000-seat, $84 million Henderson Events Center, which will take 18 months to complete and house the Silver Knights games at the site of the old Henderson Pavilion off Green Valley Parkway.
The city of Henderson is kicking in $10.75 million for the $25 million Lifeguard Arena and another $42 million for the construction of the Henderson Events Center arena.
At 10 a.m. this morning, the Golden Knights held a media event to show off the opening of Lifeguard Arena, an updated version of the City National Arena ice center in Downtown Summerlin.
For Bubolz, minor league sports is a return to his roots. The Golden Knights president began his sports marketing and business work where so many do — in minor league baseball in the heartland of America for the Tulsa Drillers and Quad Cities River Bandits in Davenport, Iowa.
The Golden Knights have now spawned a minor league franchise in Henderson plus two ice rink venues seven miles apart in the same city to cover the Las Vegas metro area.
Not only will they nurture future VGK players in Henderson, it’s also an incubator to hook new fans into hockey at a cheaper price than the expensive tickets at Golden Knights games at T-Mobile Arena.
Those emotional connections between fan and franchise will fuel future revenues and the Golden Knights wouldn’t want it any other way.
