Marketing Everton

The commercial and marketing aspect of Everton has for a long time been a bit of a pet hate of mine. Following a Twitter Q and A last night with our Head of Communications, Paul Tyrell, I’ve decided to try and put my thoughts into words.

For the last couple of months, Evertonains have been excited having Nike as our kit supplier, eager to get down the two Everton stores and start buying the gear. One big problem though has been the length of time it has taken for the new home kit to be released.

A full 42 days after Liverpool’s home kit went on sale, Everton’s can now be pre-ordered.

I asked Paul Tyrell about this, also asking why a club that is skint always messes up simple marketing. His reply was thus: "It’s not messed up. With the world’s biggest sportswear manufacturer you have to take your place in the queue. With a lower level brand, you can dictate."

Why then have other teams (lower league than us) who have Nike as their supplier, have had their kits out to purchase?

Now I’m sorry, but for me, his response was a very poor excuse and sums up the poor attitude Everton’s senior staff has regarding trying to drive the club forward.

Kids are the prime wearers of football kits and they love nothing more than showing off the new kit on their summer holidays. Why then do we not release kits in plenty of time for parents to purchase prior to these holidays?

Also, if you want a woman’s kit, a small kid’s kit, or need, ahem, a very large kit, then you’re screwed.

Back to when Keith Wyness took over as CEO, one of the first things he did was outsource our merchandising to JJB. On the face of it, it looked a bizarre thing to do... but, when you considered that the club was somehow losing money on this side of the business, I thought it became the sensible thing for him to do — turning a loss into an instant profit after only being in the job a few months.

We had a Liverpool city centre store, which was followed up with stores in Birkenhead and Ellesmere Port. However, these stores soon closed with the club citing our partnership with JJB as the reason due to them needing control of stores selling Everton merchandise. Which sounded strange considering Rangers had a similar agreement with JJB at the time but still had a club shop in Glasgow city centre.

Where Wyness went wrong, in my opinion, was in sitting back on the JJB deal. Instead, he should have brought people in to work in the commercial and marketing team with the job description of planning and setting out a strategy which could be implemented once the JJB deal ended, and then have the confidence of running the club’s merchandise ourselves.

Despite numerous complaints from supporters about how obtaining Everton shirts at JJB stores was, shall we say, problematic, and visually the Everton section in the JJB store in Williamson Square was near non-existent, the club renewed the their deal two years later for £10m over five years.

Still, the same problems persisted. Impossible for those outside Liverpool to go to a shop and buy a shirt, the non-kit wear range was poor, kits being released late into the summer, and on one occasion after the season had started!

The misspelling of Nil Satis Nisi Optimum on the kits, the stripes on the One 2 One kit being upside down, the change in the badge (the unnecessary inclusion of 1878 and Everton), also drew complaints.

Following Keith Wyness leaving of the club, Robert Elstone took over. When the second JJB deal ended in 2009 he signed a similar agreement with Kitbag worth a whopping £30million…. over ten years though. Again, Everton not having the confidence or nous to run our own merchandising. Although, one good thing did come of it instantly: Kitbag demanding a city centre store, which also produced the idea for Everton 2 (in) Liverpool 1. I have to say, that is a quality gimmick!

Now, why can’t Everton employ the people necessary to run our own merchandising? Why do we have to tie ourselves into deals which limit what we can do?

The only way you can buy merchandise from Everton is from either of the two club shops in Liverpool, or online. Now that to me is dreadful. We should be selling our gear in as many shops as possible, in as many areas as possible. Be imaginative in creating a ‘brand’ which people want to buy into.

Now I don’t have all the answers in this regard as I’ve only an hour to write this up before work starts again, but there are simple things that we could do.

Having a store in Australia with a cardboard cut-out of Tim Cahill in the window. It doesn’t have to be flashy, or big, just a simple shop where Aussies can easily buy stuff to do with their biggest football star with Everton reaping the benefit. Plus, with the connection formed with Tim Howard and especially Landon Donovan, the USA market is also there to be exploited.

I’m sat having my lunch in an office where there is currently a massive cruise liner holding 3,080 people sitting outside. Now it sounds pretty basic, but why aren’t there any girls from the Everton 2 store standing there with vouchers for the shop? I know it doesn’t sound much, but if just 2.5% of passengers decided to take a look, that’s 75 extra people in the shop. Money in our till instead of their pockets, it all adds up.

When we got into Europe, why did the club not sell any suitable merchandise for this? Instead, fans had to buy t-shirts and hats from other fans who had designed and got these manufactured themselves.

Why when people land into John Lennon Airport is there not a proper Everton presence there? It’s like this city only has one club and we are not it...

We’re off to play two games in Indonesia this summer; it will be interesting to see if the club have put some plans in place to make some money while there.

All-in-all, it is my belief – and I’ve thought this for a number of years – that Everton Football Club’s commercial and marketing strategy is an absolute disgrace for a club of our size and stature, and that so much more could be done to increase this income stream if we had people employed on that side of the business with a bit of creativity and imagination.

For a club that’s skint, we need to increase every revenue stream we can – and this side of things ought to be a priority.

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