The failure of the Atlético de Madrid shield is a marketing lesson

2023-06-26 21:12:34

At this time, Spain is divided between two crucial elections that will mark the course of the coming years: on the one hand, the general elections of 23-J. Of other, the vote for the Atlético de Madrid shield, which has asked the bases if they want to keep the new one, adopted in December 2016, or the one of a lifetime. Seven years have passed, and what is happening may not be exciting from a footballing point of view, but it certainly is from a marketing point of view.

New Athlete

On April 23, 1985, and before the rise in sales of Pepsi, Coca-Cola decides to put aside its classic soda and launch in style New Coke. It was a stronger, richer flavor that had performed well in tests. The perfect substitute for the soda of a lifetime, which had already become outdated. The old flavor would never come out again… If it weren’t for the fact that the public’s reaction was so negative that the drop in sales forced them, only two and a half months later, to announce that the usual flavor would return as “Coca-Cola Classic” . In 2002, New Coke, converted in the name to Coke II, disappeared forever.

Something similar is happening with the Atlético de Madrid shield. Branding experts ensure that the new shield is better understood, is more dynamic and modern, and is more attractive to the eye in general. But the fans don’t care. There is a basic law of marketing that has imploded, the one that says that all news is badly received at first and in the end it ends up staying in the popular imagination (remember the reception of Mr. Limpio as a substitute for Mister Proper, for example).

And it is that Atlético de Madrid had reached the point that every brand wants to reach at some point in its life: the fans personified the shield, they gave it a familiarity that, by itself, it does not have. Some people on Twitter are already saying that they don’t care if the other is prettier: Or would you like your mother’s new boyfriend more if he was more handsome than your father? The shield understood as a father, as a family, as an absolute identification. It doesn’t matter if the new one comes with 100-euro bills for everyone under their arms or if the changes are minimal: fans want the usual.

From the point of view exclusively of the brand, the violence with which the fans are making a choice that the management team, deep down, doesn’t give a damn about, is quite a marketing lesson. What happens when you disappoint your most passionate fans and change everything they believe in? If Netflix switched to a green logo tomorrow, or if Carrefour dropped its “C” to put a flower in its place (Carreflor? I’ll leave it there) they would cause less controversy. It is no longer that football feels more or less, it is not a player, it is not a goal, it is not a stadium: it is a shield. It is the pure and simple brand that the fans are fighting for, an iconography that is more than that: it is everything they feel, in an irrational way, for a club. And is that, what is more irrational than sport, after all?

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