Infallible source - "The club was known as SV Austria Salzburg, and had several sponsored names, before being bought by the Red Bull company in 2005 who renamed the club and changed its colours from its traditional violet and white to red and white. The change resulted in some of the team's fans forming a new club, SV Austria Salzburg." "The New York Red Bulls are an American professional soccer team based in Harrison, New Jersey. The team competes in the Eastern Conference of Major League Soccer (MLS). It is one of the ten charter clubs of MLS, having competed in the league since its inception. The team was a founding member of MLS (1996), but has gone through several name changes. The team was originally known as the New York/New Jersey MetroStars through 1997. From the 1998 season through the 2005 season, the team was known as the MetroStars. On March 9, 2006, the team was sold to Red Bull GmbH, leading to the team's current name." I was correct on both counts. Never heard of the others.
There ARE ways around this. It's a matter of if Dr. Allam can be bothered. I reckon the club will eventually end up in the state that he found it ... maybe a bit better off ... but the novelty of the KC will wear off ... the fact is, if someone started a club called Hull Tigers, the FA would not refuse them membership. There's a team called Whitehawk ..... in the Conference system, something like "Red Bull Leipzig" will eventually happen in the UK .... I can't see how the FA can stop it .... Burntisland Shipyard FC ... a trade name ... a brand .... historically, hull Comet changed their name to Hull City ... there was Hull Brunswick ... which was also a brand name ..... Riley was a car manufacturer ... also a school .... Bristol cars ....... I liked Boothferry Park but accepted a new ground was perhaps a better alternative to renovating fer ark ..... and I understand the affection and pride for the name Hull City but if tweaking of club names for commercial reasons is going to happen anyway, I'd rather Hull City did it first and got a load of benefit than be the last ones to do it .... it might be different if we were guaranteed a grant for keeping the name Hull City ..... Dr. allam god bless him, wants to have a pop at muscling in on the territory Man U, Liverpool, Chelsea et al think they own .... I like that ... I like it we have a chairman with an "I don't care who the big clubs think they are ... were going after them" .... I really like that .... I wish more fans shared that ambition for the club ... like anything else ... it's a punt ... maybe a dream as well ..... but I admire his spirit ... he doesn't see limitations, he sees possibilities .... Hull City's nickname is one of the few things it has going for it .... other clubs have owners richer than ours, bigger catchment areas, bigger grounds, wealthier fans, wealthier local businesses, higher profiles, better communications ... what do City have? I very nice but small stadium .... which means the cost of buying and paying players to even keep the club in the Premier League has to be shared amongst a smaller number of fans paying higher ticket prices .... a club in that situation needs all the help it can get ..... if Dr. Allam had Abramovitch's money, he wouldn't be bothered about re-branding ... the big clubs already are brands and would never re-brand themselves .... Hull City is a club aspiring to be a brand and perhaps defining that brand with a view to the future is a smart move .... and, as I keep saying, the name can always be changed back if we find sponsors don't need the Tigers connection anymore .... a bit like John Lydon .... he used the brand Johnny Rotten until it had served its purpose then reverted back to his real name ....
**** me, this is the pro changers version of the kiddy raping argument used by the anti changers - ****ing nonsense!
The name change is bollocks, it will generate no new income, the whole thing is predicated on a lie and only ****ing imbeciles can't see it.
You keep trying to squeeze in the same s**te that's been discredited no end of times, but you miss the glaring great elephant in the room that is there is no business reason to support a name change, it's simply done to spite the Council. Don't come back with loads more bollocks and full stops, post something robust and defensible that supports your claim that a name change will bring in money and is nothingto do with the spat with the Council. Enough people have posted examples showing it won't. Basically, piss or get off the pot.
Including international experts in various fields and the man that wrote the document Allam claimed he got the idea from, but it doesn't stop the same posters churning it out repeatedly in the hope of attention.
FFS, are you serious? It's like a stuck record. To start yourself off, have a look for the report Allam reckoned he'd read that gave him the idea, then check out the response from the author. I reckon if even his primary source doesn't support it, it's about as dead as a duck can get. That's just on the money side, the Club history part's been shown as dubious at best too.
Who are the international experts and what exactly did they say, assuming they didn't reference raping children or some fella from the Sex Pistols who advertises a buttery substitute....
If you don't know the answer to that, you obviously haven't been following this at all. And if you haven't been following it, it begs the question as to why you are even posting about it.
Try googling or reading some of the many posts. I'm ****ed if I can be arsed to educate you if you can't help yourself.
Just a few... “Much of the ‘marketing theory’ being quoted by Mr Allam is, quite frankly, nonsense, but the one area he has completely failed to grasp is brand engagement” - Mark Ritson (PPA Columnist of The Year for business media), Marketing Weekly. “I think Hull City is the better choice. There is contemporary theory that says brands are not decided by owners; they’re decided by consumers or fans. To jettison [the present brand] seems to me culturally wrong and economically foolhardy” - Grant McCracken (economist, anthropologist and author) speaking on BBC Radio 4’s Business Matters. “Why would you throw it away in favour of something that’s totally untested and tried? I would really support the ‘Hull City’ guys on this one” - Jyoti Malhotra (business journalist) speaking on BBC Radio 4’s Business Matters.
I'll save him the trouble... Equally misguided is Dr Allam’s use of what he described as a “Harvard Business School paper” as support for his “name-shortening” theory. He sent the summary page of this article (“Company Name Fluency, Investor Recognition and Firm Value”33) to us after we requested more details. Originally published in the Journal Of Financial Economics, it evidently came to Dr Allam’s attention after it was mentioned on the Harvard Business Review blog on 12 September 2013. The complete article (viewable at http://bit.ly/comname) is 59 pages long. We suspect that Dr Allam only read the summary, though, since the full paper has no relevance to the marketing of football clubs; instead, it relates to the attractiveness of companies with short names to stockbrokers buying and selling shares. Our analysis of this paper’s lack of relevance was confirmed when CTWD spoke to the co-author of the paper: Clifton Green, of Goizueta Business School, Emory University, Atlanta. He told us: “Applying our study’s findings directly to the Hull City name is perhaps pushing on it too strongly. For example, we find the added benefits of name simplicity are weaker for larger, older companies where the name has already been well established. And none of the company name changes in our study elicited the backlash that is accompanying the Hull City situation.” “It is possible that a name change could bring in new fans from abroad, but it would be nice to test that idea before alienating the local fans. Go to Asia and other countries where you want new fans and do focus groups and surveys. Marketers would have many things to talk about, and I don't think that whether to change the name would be high upon the list of things to consider in terms of how to market the team.” He added, “Focusing on The Tigers is an easy thing to do without having to drop City.”
The madness with this, is that there are some, and will probably be many more issues with the proposed group. I've an issue with the silence over the stand move. It's inevitable and should be viewed as healthy if handled in the right way, but the comments here actually relate to actions of the former, single issue group, which in my view, and those of many others acted in a thoroughly comendable and professional way throughout the campaign. I do wonder what people fear from a fans group.
Vaslav We are already known as the Tigers. If he thinks he can get money by changing that into Hull Tigers he should be able to get it as Hull City The Tigers. The photo of Ehab holding a programme used for Burns' interview with him shows how it can be done. Just put Tigers in big letters. To muscle in on the sponsorship deals of the top 6 you need sustained success not a gimmick. Unless the FA changes its rules then all name change applications go through them. There is no way around that. If Assem Allam wants to be called Hull Tigers it can do it tomorrow. All he has to do is walk out the Premier League and the FA and start his own league.
Cheers OLM a much more considered response than DMD, no surprise there, I'm as against the name change as most; but the constant battering of others opinions without any attempt to back up or evidence the abuse doesn't achieve much. I'd hope that the two post above from OLM evidencing the negative take on the name from those conneted to business and not the club will have a greater impact on those in favour than people just calling them ****s?
Gareth Edwards examines the situation surrounding Hull City’s proposed name change by owner Assem Allam and why it must be stopped. “What’s in a name? That which we call a rose, by any other name would smell as sweet”. So wrote Shakespeare in Romeo and Juliet. It’s a shame that there was no professional football in the time of the Bard. If there had been he would have learned that in some love affairs names matter an awful lot. Take for instance the continuing trials and tribulations at Hull City AFC. For a year fans have been fighting proposals put forward by the club’s owner, Assem Allam, to change the team’s name. The plan was that they would be known nationally as the Hull City Tigers and internationally as Hull Tigers. Allam’s reasoning was simple to the point of foolhardy: rebranding the club would mean greater appeal in the potentially lucrative, Premier League-loving markets of the Far East. If that little piece of marketing genius meant sacrificing 110 years of history in the process, then so be it. Whether Allam realised or not, this was a decision destined to draw the ire of Hull fans. And it did. Big time. Supporters moved quickly, forming the campaigning group ‘City ‘Til We Die’. Banners were dropped, petitions were signed, a full page ad appeared in the Hull Daily Mail, and protests were staged with placards proclaiming: “Hull City AFC: A Club Not A Brand”. The group put out a statement saying: “We, as representatives of a wide spectrum of Hull City AFC supporters across the UK and beyond, call on the Allams to put a stop to this. We are Hull City AFC, there is nothing wrong with that name and it should stay put.” In a wonderful display football fans and supporters groups across the country offered their solidarity. The fans views were, however, dismissed out of hand. “Nobody,” said Allam, “questions my decisions in my business.” Thankfully the Football Association disagreed and in April rejected the bid to change the name of the club. This decision prompted the mother of all millionaire hissy fits from Allam, the sort of tantrum you might expect to see from a toddler having just been told to get in their bath or from MP’s who had been informed they wouldn’t be getting a pay rise. Allam said: “We stated earlier this year that the club would be for sale if our attempt to globally promote Hull Tigers as a brand name and playing name be blocked,” he said in a prepared statement. As a consequence of the FA’s decision on April 9, I announced on April 10 that Hull City is for sale. This announcement is in accordance with my decision 10 months ago that I would walk away within 24 hours (if the rebrand was unsuccessful). In actual fact it was 22 hours. I don’t call bluffs.” Despite the relative success of last season’s campaign, some excellent summer signings and the obligatory request from manager Steve Bruce for fans to “get behind the team”, disquiet still persists on the terraces of the KC Stadium. Not only has Allam taken the name change case to the Court of Arbitration for Sport, he has also altered the club badge, thereby reneging on a promise to consult with supporters before any such change was made. The fight of the Hull City AFC fans is a microcosm of the wider argument about football in general. Is it a game of pride, passion and entertainment for fans everywhere? Or is it the plaything of the rich, a way of massaging their egos and boosting their profits? Of course formally, legally, a football club is the property of its owner, but most fans feel a sense of ownership over their club more profound than can be typed on a set of legal documents. Every supporter talks about the club they support in terms of the collective. All of us speak of how “we” won at the weekend, or how good “our” form has been, or tell our friends that “their” team is awful. Why? Because players, managers, board members and owners come and go – but we fans are here for life. Cheering on eleven guys kicking a ball around may seem silly to some people – but for so many of us it is part of our identity. We invest our time, our emotions and our money into these clubs. We care. And it matters to us more than they can ever possibly understand. It is for these reasons that the supporters of Hull City AFC continue their protests. And why all true football fans wish them well. http://www.matchdayapp.com/hull-city-afc-club-brand/
