Ep. 7 - Soccer, Brands and Community: A Deep Dive with Brett Parker

Welcome to another episode of Pitch to Pro, where we're pulling back the curtain on the exhilarating, high-stakes world of soccer team branding. We promise that you'll come away with a whole new perspective on what it takes to create a brand from scratch, specifically for a soccer club, and how that process can stir up a community's love and passion for the sport. In today's episode, we're thrilled to have Brett Parker from Stone Ward, a renowned creative agency with a wealth of sports marketing experience, drop some serious knowledge on us.

We kick things off by delving into the nitty-gritty of soccer club branding and naming, and why it's so crucial. We dissect the impact of event marketing, touch on the growth of women's sports, and soccer in particular, and hear Brett Parker's experiences from the trenches.  Brett speaks on how a brand tells a captivating story, leaving a lasting imprint on its audience, and the power of authenticity in strengthening that connection. We spotlight the success of Oakland Roots Soccer Club, which beautifully harnessed the power of community and social impact.

As we move forward, we peel back layers to reveal the process of birthing a new brand for USL Arkansas. Hear about the thrill and the daunting responsibility of shaping a brand that resonates with the community's core values and beliefs. We reflect on the journeys of clubs like Oakland Roots and Inter-Miami, whose well-defined missions and strong brands serve as inspiration. Lastly, we delve into the crucial role the community plays in this process. Their input is the heartbeat that will determine the club's soul. So whether you're a die-hard soccer fan or a branding enthusiast, this episode promises to be a thrilling ride filled with valuable insights. Tune in and be part of this incredible journey!

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:04

Pitch to Pro is the official podcast of USL Arkansas. This will be our platform to tell our story about the club and the special place that we call home, Northwest Arkansas. This is a journey we want to bring you along for the ride. We'll share what's going on behind the curtain, help educate the community at large about soccer, our league, and give updates on the progress of the club along the way. Together, we'll explore and unpack our journey to professional soccer, the magic that is NWA, our community, and talk all things soccer from on the pitch to behind the scenes, telling the story of our club. Pitch to Pro podcast is proudly sponsored by PodcastVideoscom. Podcastvideoscom is Northwest Arkansas's premier podcast recording studio, Equipped with industry-leading equipment. The recording studio and services save you time, money and hassle. They are dedicated to helping you create, record and publish high-quality podcasts for your audience. Be sure to check them out today at PodcastVideoscom.

Speaker 1: 1:07

Hello everybody and welcome back to the Pitch to Pro podcast.

Speaker 1: 1:10

I am your host, Wes Harris, managing director for USL Arkansas, Northwest Arkansas's professional soccer club, playing here in the United Soccer League. I am so excited for today's episode because we are going to be talking about a topic that is probably on top of everyone's mind and the question that I most get when I'm talking to people on social media, whatever it is, and that is what is the Stinking Club's name going to be? Spoiler alert, there are no spoilers in this episode. We won't be answering that question today, but I do have a very special guest here with me today, Mr Brett Parker, who is the managing partner at our creative agency, Stoneward, and he's going to be here to chat through kind of the process, our journey that we've kind of embarked on together and, ultimately, which will lead us to come up with our club name and branding and identity and colors and crest and all of those fun things. So, Brett, welcome to the show. Thank you so much for joining me today. I'm so excited. This is going to be a great discussion.

Speaker 2: 2:18

I'm excited. I have my pages of notes. I'm going to take out the ones where I was going to give all the spoilers.

Speaker 1: 2:23

We figured it out, we wrote the names.

Speaker 2: 2:26

I thought you were talking about Taylor Swift, of what everyone was thinking about, and her and Travis. Kelsey. So I'm going to take that off the list. That is tonight, that's right, but I am excited to be here. I'm excited to tell the listeners who we are, more importantly, all the good that you guys have been doing behind the scenes that they might not know about.

Speaker 1: 2:43

So thanks for having me yeah, man, no, that's great. I mean, I think that's a great segue. So I think, first and foremost, I want you to just kind of if you could introduce yourself who you are, a little bit about your background, and then jump into kind of who Stone Ward is kind of work do you guys do? What kind of clients do you guys have? What kind of projects have you worked on? Give everybody a little bit of a flavor into kind of Stone Ward and who you guys are.

Speaker 2: 3:11

Absolutely Well. Thanks for having me. I'm Brett Parker, managing partner of our Northwest Arkansas office at Stone Ward. Who is Stone Ward?

Speaker 2: 3:19

We are a full service advertising agency with national reach Really set in another way. There's a lot of agencies that do what we do, but we think we're a little different. We like partnering with you guys, brands like USL Arkansas who build good in their communities. In our little tagline we like to say we use our creative force for good and I can't think of anyone else that's building good and will continue to build good in their communities, like USL Arkansas and here for ever 16 years.

Speaker 2: 3:55

So with that, we have been blessed to work with some amazing sport clients so some that you listeners might heard of and we US men's and women's soccer team that's kind of what brought us together is that expertise in soccer and sports marketing. We have worked with them since 2009. Our Chicago office works with them. We do everything from a creative services for US men's and women's, from social content to strategy to design, to even wrapping stadiums. We have our hand in that. So any stadium design, you see, we get to do that. We've worked with them through multiple World Cups, which is crazy.

Speaker 1: 4:38

That's awesome.

Speaker 2: 4:39

So we've had that experience. Then that kind of trickled down to NWSL, so National Women's Soccer League, which has just grown at epic proportions. I think soccer continues to grow, but especially women's sports and soccer. That is where this epic growth and fandom is really stemming from, and a lot of my friends got into soccer because of the women's soccer teams. That's kind of where their admiration and love and passion grew, so that's been great For them. They had a record setting season this year so that was awesome with the NWSL championship. So that's kind of domestically. But then international we even have Como 1907. So they're an Italian club. If any of you guys listening haven't been over there and seen the stadium, it's epic, it's amazing right on Lake Como.

Speaker 2: 5:32

I'm shout out to.

Speaker 1: 5:33

Sesh Fabricas. By the way, shout out give us some free tickets, man.

Speaker 2: 5:37

Like, let us come over there. We got to do something really cool with them. It's yeah, we do design and strategy but we also do event marketing. So we brought the Como team over to the TST, the soccer tournament, and the whole goal was to basically grow love and admiration for this international team. So we brought them over. We had a contest, we brought this dedicated fan group who brought all their chants and cheers and love to the TST. We did kind of an exit poll and it was the number one thing from that tournament.

Speaker 2: 6:18

It was the Como fans.

Speaker 1: 6:20

That people remembered and just took part in love about it. It was great, that's great.

Speaker 2: 6:24

So we done that and then we kind of also had our hands in USA curling. We just do a lot of sports. One person the process we're going with USL Arkansas. We did that with USA curling. They loved it so much. One person sent a photo. They got it tattooed on their arm. Another one did a stained glass piece for a church, almost looking like.

Speaker 1: 6:45

Oh, that's great.

Speaker 2: 6:47

So that's kind of who we are. In a nutshell is we're sports passionate and that's kind of what brought us here today.

Speaker 1: 6:53

No, that's great and I think it just speaks to kind of you guys's pedigree and work that you guys have done across multiple different sports properties and then your soccer in particular, soccer expertise and understanding that consumer and that fan base that is growing and changing and molding and all those fun things. So, and then Arkansas based. So you guys are right here in our backyard, so all the more reason for us to kind of dive in together. And it's been great so far.

Speaker 1: 7:23

It's been, seems like a long time, but also really short and then you know it's like the theory or relativity there, or whatever Einstein did, coming into fruition here. But before we jump into our project, I wonder if you could, we could, kind of take a step back and I want to hear from you, the expert maybe the listeners do too in terms of you know, talk about branding and club naming for a second Like from your perspective, and you guys are living this every single day. This is what you guys do, this is your bread and butter. How important and we know the answer. But I want to hear you talk about it a little bit. How important is it to get right? What is it set up and how does it set up the club for success with fans, with the organization, with partners within the community? Talk a little bit about what does a brand and a club name mean for a soccer?

Speaker 2: 8:25

club. I think we've seen it so far with all the surveys you've done and all the focus groups. It's everything. It is foundational and to really almost exaggerate it but I don't think it is it's the most foundational step of this entire process. And I'm talking brand strategy. Brand creation so is a part of that. Logo and crest and name, absolutely. But that's at the very end and we're not even there yet, right? But the first thing you usually talk about is what's the name gonna be? Right?

Speaker 1: 8:57

That's what everybody wants to jump to.

Speaker 2: 8:59

What's it gonna look like? And where we are right now and we'll get to that in this conversation is before that's even done. We've gotta figure out who we are and what our vision is. So I have my definition, but I always like asking our clients is, if we think of brand when I say brand West, like what is the definition of brand to you? And then I'll kind of give you what my thought is. But what I said, what does brand? What does that mean to you?

Speaker 1: 9:26

I think it's what do people think of when they think of you Is a lot of what I think about, and what and to kind of expound on that is, how do people feel when they see your logo, how do they feel when they see your brand? A lot of it is the emotion on how do people think of you, what do people think of you and what you stand for. And I think that that when I think of brand, I think of almost like your reputation and what you stand for as a company, as a club, as, whatever the brand or logo, whatever it may be tied to, you can have a personal brand. We all know this too. What are people saying about you and how do they feel about you?

Speaker 2: 10:15

That's it, and so there's. I always like getting that definition because we all say the same thing but we all say it completely different, but we're all shooting for that. So there's two that I always like to reference. One is I wanna give a shout out to Karen Post. She has a book out there if you guys love brands and strategies. It's called Brain Tattoos and it's all about, basically, how do you embed a brand Into your brain. Some agencies will say we want to work with clients who are tattoo worthy Harley Davidson, usl insert, whoever your favorite brand is, if you're gonna get a tattoo of it, that is tattoo worthy. So she has a really good definition that I've always used with our clients.

Speaker 2: 10:56

And it's a brand, is a story, embedded in the mind of the market, mm-hmm. And so when you kind of take that apart, I've always loved it because one story, so a brand is a story. It's not a logo, mm-hmm. It's not a design, mm-hmm. When we get around campfires, when we go to church, when we go to the pubs, mm-hmm, it's all in story. Yeah, right, so that's one part of it. Then you get embedded, so deeply implanted it's impossible to forget. Yeah, that's one thing we're working towards. What is the mind? Well, that's our network of neurons learning influence perception, as you talked about.

Speaker 2: 11:38

Mm-hmm and then market. That's our. What we'll talk about a lot of this is our community yeah, it's, it's our area, it's our soccer, it's anything. That's what I love is that definition. Another one that we usually talk about is Jeff Bezos. It's really aligned to what you talked about. Your brand is what other people say about you when you're not in the room Mm-hmm. That is what we are trying to figure out today on this podcast and we're gonna talk you, kind of give you an inner look of how that process works. But that comes way before, yeah, logo and crest and design. So that's kind of what brand means to me.

Speaker 1: 12:15

That's awesome. That's awesome. So, from that lens, what maybe are, before we get into ours and I know everybody's waiting for me to jump into ours from that lens, what are maybe some of your favorite soccer brands and identities? And if you have any, and and why, what do you? What do you love about them?

Speaker 2: 12:39

I've got two that stand out and so, to preface it of, of brand creation. The question is, where do you start and when you? When you talk about those you admire, why do you admire them? To me, I love brands that have discovered their authentic core belief. It's something that unifies all communities Together and, luckily for usl Arkansas, it's the hardest puzzle piece right now, because we have so many great communities there are. How do we bridge all of these together? So two that I think do it really well, for different reasons. One is Oakland roots soccer club.

Speaker 2: 13:15

Yeah, and I think anybody listening who knows Oakland roots and soul can say yep, I get it. For those that maybe aren't as familiar with them, I'll give you a little background. Is their mission, to quote it, is they want to what they they're. Why? Why are they here? Yeah, they're here to harness the magic of Oakland and the power of sports as a social force for good. Mm-hmm, it doesn't talk about winning championships. Yeah, it doesn't talking about being the best club in their region. It talks about being a social force for good.

Speaker 2: 13:51

And for those that don't know the background because I know Wes has probably knows everything about everything soccer is we live in a sports world in Oakland where most are leaving the area. And you had that with Golden State Warriors. They left Oakland. You had that with the Raiders went to Las Vegas. You're having that recently with the Oakland A's, where they're talking about it Just got approved, just got approved. And now you have the Oakland Roots and Soul who are coming back and they're doubling down that not only are we going to stay in Oakland, we're gonna use this place for good.

Speaker 2: 14:25

And really what they've done is a lot of different things. They are unapologetic, no matter if you love it or hate it, at least they toe the line, they have a line of where they stand and they put stances on political, social, environmental issues from a soccer club. In a community. We always think of soccer as a sport, but you and I know, and listeners who grew up in sports and love this sport knows how many people it can touch through this power, so I thought that was interesting. You and I were talking about previous, before we started this podcast, about how some corporations have these unique roles. With what you're talking about, walmart, they have a chief purpose office. Oh, that's awesome. So when we think of sports, they're living to their why. It's not just lip service, and the result of that is you always think about results of okay, brett or Wes, that's great. Is that really working, though?

Speaker 2: 15:23

And the answer is yes. They sell out all their home games. They're in talks now to get a new 10,000 stadium for more capacity. They still wanna be competitive that's table stakes but they wanna have a core purpose. So I think they really stand out to me for doing amazing things. And that's what's really inspired me about you and Warren and Chris is for listeners.

Speaker 2: 15:47

I'm telling you these guys believe in this, they believe in the power of community. So I think that's one angle. The other one is, I think, inter-miami. I think that's always a good one. They wanted to bring world-class football to the world-class city once and for all and I think, just quickly they brought in Beckham as a co-owner, messi brought him in and there was two sides of impacts that we saw on that because, again, they knew their why and they orchestrated to their why and that led to being one of the worst in the leagues to winning a title. I thought that was pretty interesting.

Speaker 2: 16:26

And then a fact that we always kinda talk about is how does a brand's footprint go beyond your local geography? Yes, we wanna be known. I'll use this for USL Arkansas. I wanna be known Northwest Arkansas. I wanna understand and know this region. But I think in the future, it would be very nice if we could expand that love and admiration and passion. And so, with Inter-Miami, you had, when Messi announced it, his jerseys, in 24 hours sold more than any other player changing the team. That includes LeBron's, that includes Tom Brady. So again, it goes back to yes, love goes important, yes, a crest is important. The ones who do it right, which is what we're kinda in this journey of get your brand creation, your brand strategy, done first.

Speaker 1: 17:18

Right, that's great, yeah. And Inter-Miami has a really cool. They leaned in with the Flamingo and all of that and the colors and that, obviously bringing, in my opinion, the greatest soccer player of all time to your club and going from one million to seven million Instagram followers for the club in 24 hours or whatever it was it was just nuts. So I think that also and we can go way down a tangent here in terms of brand and of a club. And then that's where we talked about personal brand of your player and how do those mesh and how do you work through that marriage a little bit and how does that come to fruition and play out with your fan base and the rest of the world and that admiration you talked about, which they certainly did a great job. Now we can also talk about their average ticket prices for next year and the hot water that their fans are in. But I think from a branding standpoint, they've done a great job. I would agree with you. So that's great. I mean that's awesome to.

Speaker 1: 18:26

I always ask that question of people and it's always interesting. I'm more interested in the why and a lot of that is true, I think, in terms of people and a lot of the questions that I get around the name and what we're gonna be doing and all those things, and a lot of the comments too, to their credit, in the supporters group have been look, guys, we don't know what they're gonna be, you know called at the end of the day, but as long as we can get behind them from a mission and what they stand for, I think we're gonna support them. And I think that that speaks back to getting that right first. Right and is what so many people probably likely miss, especially when they're not in the industry, like you know kind of you and I are, they go jump straight to. This is what I think the crest should be or the name should be.

Speaker 1: 19:16

Well, first you gotta figure out who you want to be and what you wanna stand for and what you want people to be saying about you when you're not in the room. Then, once you have that, then let's jump into some of this other fun stuff. And that's kind of the beginning stuff is really where I really enjoyed digging into that, with some of my background too. But so from all of that now let's jump into where I know people want us to jump to, which is our project. So, for everybody, broad strokes, can you kind of lay out the process in terms of what's our journey, what are the key kind of phases and milestones and what are those key steps along the way that will ultimately lead us to kind of presenting a brand and a name for the club, without giving anything away obviously and we don't have anything to give away yet, to be clear, we're not there yet. But give people a little bit of a sneak peek in terms of the process. What are we doing?

Speaker 2: 20:24

Right, well, I'll take the Ozark Razorbacks Razorbacks.

Speaker 2: 20:27

Opelist, that's what Wes wanted to go with, but we'll take that one out. It starts with our process, is with what you guys at USL Arkansas have been doing since day one is listening to the community. That's number one, is where we've started and where we continue to play in this jigsaw puzzle and I'll kind of get into that. But going back of where we need to start, it's getting to that authentic core belief. That's number one. Everything else, like building a house, can build off of that. We have to have a unified belief and the stronger that belief that is shared through our audiences, the stronger that relationship's gonna be. That's what we're trying to figure out and that's what we've had these internal discussions, and it's more than the USL Arkansas team and Stone Ward. It is more than that. We can't decide this. The community is going to decide this and that's where these listening sessions and 2000 plus survey responses plug in for USL Arkansas. Go get some more input in there, because the more data we can get, the better, and that's where we wanna start. Another way of thinking of that is we're trying to discover our soul. We're not trying to be prescriptive. We would like to find, through all of this fun stuff, as we just talked about with Oakland roots, or even, if you wanna get out of sports, think of one of the best that does. It is Dove. Dove has a soul. They know their audiences and they know what their audiences get a line for. So that's what we're trying to do is figure out what that soul is, one that I really like, that has a true soul, is habitat for humanity. What they say is we want everyone to have a decent place to live. That's soul and that's custom and that's genuine. That is where we are in this process and where we are in sports is we have to use community and relationships to discover that Cause, as we talked about, it's gonna be built more than a corporate entity or a agency of strategist. It's gonna be built by the Carloses of the world and the Collins of the world. If you have a person, was it traveling to every Austin Texas soccer match? That is our soul and we have to express that from everyone we can. But we also know Carlos is completely different than a Colin Colin's, completely different than a Brett and Rogers and different than a Chris in Insert Whatever City, and so I think that was your number one puzzle piece. You told our team we have so much good in the community. We have to figure out what that common thread is. So that's where we are.

Speaker 2: 23:09

It's been super challenging. For those listeners that might not know. We have a lot of different puzzle pieces we're trying to put together, and what that is it's. We have multiple audiences. We have a club where it's going to be in Rogers, but it needs to represent Northwest Arkansas, so it's not gonna be an Insert City FC and Insert this SC. We have to go beyond that and we have to go beyond sports interests. We have the Razorbacks we're competing with. We have to go against professional sports. Most areas have a professional sports team. We don't have that yet. We're gonna be the first. And then we have the transplant side of it. Where what? 60, is it 60%?

Speaker 1: 23:52

Like 60% of the population, northwest Arkansas is not from here. They're from around the rest of the world.

Speaker 2: 23:57

So throw all those puzzle pieces on a table and figure out brand strategy. So that's kind of what we're doing right now to really help build out that framework. Step one is we've got to figure that out and we're getting really close to that. Listening to you guys and these listeners and community that's number one with what you and Warren and Chris have told us and we 100% agree. Listen to the community. So thank you guys for all your input. That's where we're gonna start. Once we get that figured out, our foundation is set and now we can start putting our walls together. And our walls can be anything. What we call them is.

Speaker 2: 24:34

It could be your brand DNA, it could be your mission, your vision, your values. That's kind of how we're somewhat operating. Where your mission is why are you doing what you're doing? Your vision is this aspirational future. Northwest Arkansas is such an amazing place and it's gonna be even greater in 20 years. How do we insert USL Arkansas today? But how do we also see past 20 years?

Speaker 2: 25:05

Because the biggest thing brands get wrong is, as you talked about, doing it too quickly or jumping to a logo before you figured this out, or every year. They didn't put a lot of thinking into it and they reimagine it every year. It's like a brand is a human component. You have a personality, wes, I have a personality. If I reinvented that every year, you probably wouldn't wanna hang out with me. So we're trying to figure that out.

Speaker 2: 25:34

And then, last is, your values is what are those core beliefs? That's gonna define our character and our culture, and how can we make it go past lip service or something corporate? We value excellence and integrity and we want everyone to be the best they can be. Anybody can say that. So, going back to the soul, how do we make it unique? So that's kind of where we are, where we're trying to figure out the authentic core belief, get our walls up on mission, vision, values. We're getting really close with all the community feedback that we've received and then from there then we can get into the fun visual elements that everyone's super excited about.

Speaker 2: 26:14

How does the name reflect on that? How does the name reflect on those values? How does the logo, the crest, the design, how does that infuse with everything? And then, spoiler alert, we still have an amazing women's team we have to figure out too, so add another puzzle piece to this whole thing. Should they work together. Should they be independent? Can they be cohesive yet different? So that's a long-winded way of saying we're in it. It's been fun. We have the puzzle pieces and now we're putting them together.

Speaker 1: 26:43

No, that's great, and I wanted you to kind of walk through that to kind of everybody keeps asking, well, how's it going, what are you guys doing? And I thought what better way to then to have the experts in the room that we're working with come and share a little bit about the process and what we're doing. So hopefully that gives you guys a little bit of feedback, and I am trying to share what we can share when we can share it. And so I think one of the things that I think people would love to hear would be, as you guys have kind of jumped in and you know you guys have jumped in feet first and with both feet and just immersed yourself in all of the key learnings that kind of we had from our listening sessions and kind of the report out from that and our key learnings there. But also we did, you know, other rounds of surveys whether it was name and why to kind of get a lot more of the you know thinking behind names and where people's thoughts were in terms of emotion and what ties that to that to.

Speaker 1: 27:54

You know the secondary survey that we did with you guys specifically to try to get a little bit more granular about folks in the area and the region and how they felt and different events that they partake in. What are some of those key learnings for you? And it could be from that, it could just be from this process and immersing yourself through it. As you guys are talking with the group, you know again, without giving too much away that we can't share yet but what's been some of those kind of biggest key learnings for you? What's kind of jumped out at you as we've gone in and at least for now that we've gone into this process? I'm sure we'll have a meeting here in two weeks where we jump into things a lot more and you may have a different answer, but so far, what are some of those things that have jumped out at you?

Speaker 2: 28:45

The number one. There's a lot and I think for those listeners who think sometimes a marketer or a strategist kind of sits back and just kind of thinks all day, it's not true. You're going through I think Wes can attest to this thousands and thousands of rows of Excel data and responses and listening sessions and transcripts and word clouds, and you're really trying to be a detective, a brand detective, of putting all this together Through all of that. The number one thing that I think you would agree is the love for Northwest Arkansas, this beautiful place, and I knew that going into how much love there was and passion for what USL Arkansas was going to do. But it went further than that.

Speaker 2: 29:31

People told us stories of how this is going to impact their life and how soccer has impacted their life in their first game that they witnessed with their grandmother. We're reading stories where in normal responses it's a yes, no, here's a form submission. So that's number one is I kind of knew going into it we're going to have some passionate people, but it's across the board, from avid soccer fans to a generalist who kind of likes sports, to someone who might not even be interested in soccer, but they love community. And so all three of these is passion is what stood out to me and even before Stoneward got involved, I love how you and Warren and Chris have this statement is make Northwest Arkansas an even greater place to live, work and play, and that stands out to me. There's a lot of clients that I've worked with who do amazing things. You three, your love for this place and the sport and the beautiful game far exceeds what I thought it was going to be.

Speaker 2: 30:36

Sometimes you guys say things I'm like did they reverse that? But it's genuine.

Speaker 1: 30:40

Yeah, so you're saying we're bigger soccer freaks than you thought. I knew you were going to be like a big soccer freak. It is crazy.

Speaker 2: 30:50

So that was number one. That was really impressive for this team and this club. The second one is really one of the most fun and challenging projects, so we knew, going into it it was going to be tough, yeah, but with US men's and women's soccer or national women's soccer league or even Como, they somewhat have an identity. Our managing partner out of Chicago, tom Lilig, said it perfectly in a meeting. It gets us so excited.

Speaker 2: 31:23

Going into this, learning is all the things we don't know, because a brand can only be born one time and we get to be part of it. And how awesome is that. As marketers, we get to work on some big stuff, but you're shifting, you're evolving, you're manipulating, you're remolding, but you're never starting from scratch. So that's been a really big insight, too is we know the responsibility that we have, because we don't want to change this every single year. We want it to be something that this community can be proud of, and so it wasn't a surprise it's just it keeps surfacing of how important this project is for USL Arkansas and our community.

Speaker 1: 32:07

Yeah, no, that's awesome and may dovetail into, kind of my my last question here, which is, first of all, before I jump into that, one of the things that I said to you guys as we jumped into this was Good luck, because you guys are in for it, because this is a really tough project, because we were in it and Muddled down and mired and all the different things and all the different puzzle pieces there at play which you talked about, and I don't. I don't know that people fully understand or can appreciate it until you're actually in it and it's, it's, it's not something to. I Don't want it to sound like we're complaining by any means, but it, it, it and it absolutely isn't. My god, how many, how many chances and times in your life Can you say that you get a chance to be a part of something like this? My lord, how privileged are you and I right, like, that's what this is, the kind of stuff that gets me up every day and and what I love about be getting a chance to be a part of this.

Speaker 1: 33:19

But it, it is this unique beast Of a project, in particular the naming and the branding, and in this particular region and part of the country. It's just, it's wild To jump in and look at. You know, the octopus doesn't have eight arms, it's got 27, and so it's I just I Wanted people to hear that, not just for me, but from an expert and somebody that you know lives this every day and understand it. So and we did tell you guys when you jumped dead did this is gonna be a challenging one, but I think you guys are up for it, I think we are too, but we're almost a time. But I'll leave it with and I'll ask you and you kind of Let into this a little bit but what excites you the most, kind of looking forward About this project and kind of what we're doing together?

Speaker 1: 34:20

the 27-legged octopus that you just talked about and you're absolutely right.

Speaker 2: 34:25

We brought in we have a consultant that named us, seattle Kraken, the NHL team, and we had them look at it and give their thoughts. And that's kind of in the background, just so you all know, is we have a lot of eyes on this because we want to get it right. They doubled down and said, man, this is gonna be fun, but it's gonna be tough and it's doable as long as you have community support. Yeah, and I think Carlos said it so well is I think you asked like what should the name be? Or if he has a shortlist, right? He's like, yeah, I have a shortlist, but really, whatever it's gonna be, I'm gonna support right, and that's what we Want and that's what we hope for.

Speaker 2: 35:05

Yeah, it's this 27th leg, octopus, but if we can all Ride it together, I think it's gonna do some remarkable things. So that's what gets us excited is one. A brand can only be born one time. It goes beyond you and me. Everyone has their hands in it. Anyone that's done a form submission, anyone that's done a listening session, 100% is going to influence what the future of this is going to be.

Speaker 1: 35:32

I told everybody at every single listening session, if you're out there and you're listening, I told you that your feedback is Is this is not just a session, this is not just marketing. This is actually going to help us and help craft who we are, what we stand for, the name, the brand, all of those things, and we meant it, and I mean it's not just me. You guys are sitting here listening to the guy that's helping us, coach us through this and they're taking all of that feedback and that is such a incredible foundation of of you know. I want you guys to make our lives harder with the amount of feedback that we get. So you know to.

Speaker 1: 36:18

I think the last thing is to build on. That point is a giant Thank you, my gosh. How many? You know the number of people that came out to a listening session, the number of people that submitted a Fan survey or a secondary survey, or you know, come to one of our events and talk to us. We, we, just we can't thank you enough. I mean all of your input is is coming and we genuinely are looking at everything that you guys send us and are trying to incorporate that as best we can. So, brett I, I just want to say thank you one more time to you for coming on today. I think this has been so valuable for everybody to kind of get a little bit of a peek under the hood to the number one question that we always get, which is what the heck is the team name going to be? And then when can I be? By a season ticket switch, not coming Next week or next month, but it's coming, guys, I promise I'll drop it, okay.

Speaker 2: 37:14

No, no right.

Speaker 1: 37:15

I can't. I told you no spoiler. All right, no spoiler alerts. I promise it is on the horizon. So Anyway, guys, for now. Thank you so much, brett, for for coming on and chatting with us, and thank you, guys, for listening. We'll see you next time.

Speaker 2: 37:29

Absolutely Go US. All Arkansas appreciate it, love it. Thank you.