Ice to the Eskimos

Jon Spoelstra

• Publisher: HarperCollins e-books
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9780061745836
• Topic: Commerce
• Subtopic: Marketing
• Index: Marketing

You.
That's Right. YOU.
You've got a problem.
You've got a product that's not first in its class.
It's not even second.
You've got to find a way to market that product.

What Are You Going To Do?

You're going to read this book, that's what.

Let's face it. There comes a time in the life of every business when a product or service does not sell up to expectations.

Maybe your product is outmoded. Or hasn't been positioned correctly. Or is competing in a crowded market. Whatever the reason, Ice to the Eskimos is dedicated to helping you reclaim that lost ground. It's about taking a product or service and turning it into a winner. If you've got a product that is not the best in its field, then you will love Ice to the Eskimos. Take the principles Jon Spoelstra writes about and run hard with them—you'll be amazed by the results.

Written by the former president of the hapless New Jersey Nets, Jon Spoelstra is the man responsible for tripling that team's lagging revenues in just three years and increasing the season-ticket holders base by 250 percent. This guy knows what he's talking about. What everyone else had seen as a lost cause, Spoelstra saw as an outstanding opportunity to reawaken a tired and beaten product to achieve unprecedented profitability.

Not just for sports marketers, this lively, entertaining book successfully makes the jump from sports to whatever your product may be. The techniques Spoelstra perfected while working for teams in the NHL and NBA—from innovative packaging to image overhaul—apply to any product in any company. The numerous winning examples are sure to make Ice to the Eskimos a must-read for anyone with a product or service to sell.

Ice to the Eskimos is sure to be an instant marketing classic. It will show millions of readers how to market their product...sometimes even after they've given up hope. By using the powerful techniques in this book, you too can learn to achieve the impossible and market ice to the Eskimos.

1. JUMP-STARTING OUT OF HELL

Ground rule #1: You’ve got to want to
clip on the wires and turn up the juice.

I’ve spent almost twenty years as an executive for teams in the NBA. Of the four teams that I have worked for, I’ve seen over 250 players come and go. But the most charismatic player I’ve ever been associated with is a player you probably have never heard of: Billy Ray Bates.

Billy Ray joined the Portland Trail Blazers about halfway through the 1981-82 season. He was a 6'4", 200-pound shooting guard who had toiled in minor league basketball for a couple of seasons. Once he got the chance with us, he exhibited dunks that only a Dr. J or a Michael Jordan could even think about. And he shot the three-pointer like a Larry Bird. One season, he hoisted the Blazer team onto his shoulders and lugged them to a playoff birth. Then he averaged 27 points a game in the playoffs. The Portland crowd loved Billy Ray more than any other player I have ever seen, including Clyde Drexler.

Billy Ray’s education was spotty at best. But he sure could come up with some great one-liners. For instance, once when Billy Ray was being interviewed on our postgame radio show by Bill Schonely, the voice of the Blazers, Schonely asked him about his time in the CBA, basketball’s minor league. Billy Ray said, “The CBA is a great street corner, but you can’t hang around there for the rest of your life.”

There are hundreds of other one-line responses by Billy Ray that we heard over the two and a half years he played for us. The best was when he was in the office one summer visiting Stu Inman, the Blazers director of player personnel. After the meeting, Billy Ray walked down the long hallway where our offices were. Stu called to him, “Billy, Billy Ray.”

Billy Ray stopped right in front of my door. I looked up.

Stu yelled, “Did you see where Kentucky State [where Billy Ray starred in college] is dropping basketball?”

Without even a blink or a quick head fake, Billy Ray said, “Aw, shucks, now I won’t have nothing to remember.”

It sounded like Billy was referring to Communist Russia. You know, fall out of power and your name gets removed from the history books.

In reading this book, I think you’ll have plenty to remember and implement. If you implement just one of the jump-start marketing principles, you’ll be way ahead. If you implement a lot of the principles, you could even market ice to the Eskimos.

At the beginning of each chapter, I tell a little anecdote from my experiences in the NBA. Sometimes the anecdote is related to the chapter; sometimes it isn’t. The anecdote is just an easy way to get into the chapter. If you need a small break from reading about the jump-start marketing principles in Ice to the Eskimos, skip ahead and read the anecdotes.

 

The principles of jump-start marketing began for me with a phone call at about 11:00 P.M. on a Sunday between Christmas and New Year’s in 1991.

“This is Alan Aufzien,” the caller said. “I’m the chairman of the New Jersey Nets.”

Normally, you would answer, “Yes?” or something like that. Instead, I experienced one of those phenomenal thought processes where somehow we can think of a whole slew of things in just a nanosecond. In that nanosecond before I answered the chairman, I thought I was being set up by some students. You see, I had been teaching sports marketing at the University of Portland. To make a point on how not to do something, I always referred to the New Jersey Nets. For as long as I could remember, they had been the laughingstock of the NBA—both on and off the basketball court. To add some sick humor to the class, I would make some awful comment about their penchant for acquiring players who had problems with drugs. I would say, “The only thing that the Nets have led the league in were drug rehab cases.” Sometimes I would add, “If the Nets couldn’t draft another drug addict, they would trade for one. If that didn’t work, they would sign one as a free agent.”

When Alan identified himself, I immediately thought that some students had dreamed up a practical joke and got an adult to call and accuse me of always picking on the Nets. The tip-off was the time of day. At 11:00 P.M. in Portland, it was 2:00 A.M. in New Jersey. On a Sunday night. Little did I know at the time that the Nets would keep you up on any night of the week.

In that rush of thinking in that nanosecond, I had a perfect rejoinder to the students’ practical joke on me. “What do you need, a new drug connection for your players?” As I started to say those words, I caught myself. I chickened out. I said, “Yes?”

As you would figure, it wasn’t a practical joke. It was really the chairman of the Nets, and I didn’t make a fool of myself.

“We would like for you to come and talk to us about some consulting,” Alan said.

“I’m not interested,” I said. After eleven years as senior VP/general manager with the Portland Trail Blazers (where I resigned) and then ninety days as president/GM of the Denver Nuggets (where I was fired), I was enjoying my career as an adjunct professor. You would, too. Think of the life I was leading.

Twice a week, I would go to the campus about noon. I would have lunch with some students. I would teach my class from 1:00 to 2:20. I would walk over to the student center and have a cup of coffee. After coffee, I would walk over to the basketball arena on campus and watch practice. After an hour or so, I would come home. My wife would ask, “Well, how was your day?” “Tough,” I would say. “Really tough.”

On days that I didn’t teach, we would drive an hour and fifteen minutes to our beach house on the Oregon coast. Really, really tough.

“If you don’t want to consult, could you at least come into New York for dinner with us and give us some advice?” Alan asked. “We’ll pay all of your expenses, and a fee, of course. What would your fee be?”

I didn’t want to go to New York to have dinner. The seven owners of the New Jersey Nets had a reputation for being cheap bastards, so I gave him an outrageous fee, plus first-class expenses to fly into New York to have dinner. I knew they wouldn’t accept.

He said, “Okay, how about Wednesday night?”

The rest is history. Without that dinner, however, and the subsequent four and a half years marketing the Nets (2 years as a consultant, 2.5 years as president/chief operating officer), I would never have really got to the true essence of jump-start marketing. I would have been just like any other marketing executive who did a decent job marketing a decent product. I had never before been so flat-out challenged as I was in marketing the Nets. I don’t think any marketing executive in the history of the world has been so challenged. But without this huge challenge, I wouldn’t have come to depend on the jump-start marketing techniques that I think are applicable to any product or any company in any field.

DO YOU NEED TO BE A FAN?

I use many examples from the world of marketing a sports team to illustrate my principles of jump-start marketing. Does this mean you have to be a sports fan to appreciate these marketing principles? Of course not. Don’t mistake this book as a sports marketing book. After reading this book, you won’t be able to run away and join a pro sports team. What you will be able to do is take the ideas and principles of jump-start marketing and quickly adapt them to your particular field.

If you are indeed a sports fan, I think you’ll agree that the examples in this book are more fun to read—and the ideas can be more adaptable—than if I were writing about how to market steel or fertilizer, or sweat socks.

ARE THERE EASIER WAYS TO JUMP-START A COMPANY?

When you read the newspapers, it seems that others have found easier ways to jump-start a company. After all, almost daily you can read about a company laying off hundreds or even thousands of employees. In the short term, that probably works. The balance sheet will certainly look better. But this savings is just delaying what really needs to be done—to jump-start the company through marketing. With jump-start marketing, those employees might not need to be laid off in the first place.

Keeping employees also helps other companies. After all, employees are customers, too. When employees—or customers—get laid off, they usually “lay off” their spending. So when you read about a company laying off thousands of employees, you can say, “Thanks, pal, you just eliminated part of my market.” It would be much better for us all if companies used jump-start marketing techniques to boost sales and profits.

So, with jump-start marketing you can help your company, your employees, other companies, our country, other countries, and the world. Now, why wouldn’t you plug in and use some of these strategies and techniques and jump-start your company?

A Simple Test You Can Take

To assist you in adapting these principles to your company, I give you a little test at the end of each chapter. You don’t send in your answers for a grade. Just take the test and let the ideas flow.

It’s an open-book test, meaning that you can look back to the pages of each chapter for some of the answers. Some of the other answers aren’t in the book; they are with you. These answers involve taking the principles of jump-start marketing and applying them to your particular business.

This first little test is the easiest. It has only one question to answer. And it’s multiple choice, no less. However, if you don’t pass this easy little test of one question, you should close the book, find the receipt, and see if you can return it to the bookstore where you bought it.

(Multiple choice.) I want to:

A. Help jump-start the company I work for.

B. Help our employees perform better.

C. Help jump-start the national economy.

D. Help jump-start the world economy.

E. All of the above.

F. None of the above.

G. Use this information to help downsize my company.

Answers

If you answered (E), you did terrific! Write 150 percent (that’s on a scale of 100 percent). Take a look at that 150 percent; that’s your grade! Better than the grade, you’ll enjoy this book and be able to apply a lot of the principles of jump-start marketing. When you apply these principles, you’ll see that they work, that your company experiences some important growth. You’ll be a hero, and your employees will think of you as a saint.

If you answered (A) or (B), give yourself 120 percent. Not bad, eh? You see, if all you want to do is help jump-start the company you work for or help your employees perform better, you will accomplish both by using the principles of jump-start marketing. You’ll also accomplish (C) and (D). You didn’t get 150 percent because you didn’t have the altruistic goals of (C) and (D).

If you answered (C) or (D), grade yourself 70 percent. You passed! However, be aware that you may be a little too altruistic. Altruism starts at home—in this case your company. If you jump-start your company and thousands upon thousands of others jump-start their companies, then (C) and (D) will naturally take care of themselves.

Flunking This Little Test?

If you answered (F), I don’t quite understand your motivation for even reading this far, so your grade is incomplete. If you continue reading to the last page, then I recommend that you take this test again.

Lastly, if you answered (G), turn in your test and walk out the door. You must be a financial type that will be trying to learn the principles of jump-start marketing so that you can be a little knowledgeable when you try to kill company growth. Well, reading this book won’t work for you. The book will just confirm your belief that all marketing people are crazy.

2. ULYSSES, YOU, AND ME

Ground rule #2: Don’t fool yourself into
thinking you’re somebody else.

My son played profession...