Blame Wendy’s. Somewhere along the way in this early social media epoch, ‘brand’ was largely defined by social media presence. The copy, the comments, the tone, the personality — it added up to a sizable (perhaps too big) portion of a brand.
The elements of a brand for a sports team do include all that social media, sure, but brand is something that transcends a single department, let alone an individual on the keys, and the path to brand development does not follow a linear path. So it was illustrative to learn from Kyle Payne, who, as Senior Manager for Social Media and Content with the Arizona Diamondbacks MLB team, has seen the brand evolve, the fan touchpoints multiply — and the need for alignment throughout every part of the organization to make it all resonate.
Every sports team has its windows of opportunity, when messaging will hit and travel further and more deeply. Look at any season, but especially in the 162-game marathon of a Major League Baseball year, and even the best teams and best players are a series of peaks and valleys, spikes and flatlines (the old adage is that if you fail about 7 out of every 10 plate appearances, you’re an All-Star). That’s not to say teams can’t drive significant interaction and fan connection during the troughs, just that the surface area for success and transformative engagement increases when the team is winning. And that’s when you have to be ready to swing.
“Especially with the baseball season, which is 162 games, you’re going to have win streaks, you’re going to have losing streaks, and you’re going to have good home stands, bad home stands, road trips — all these things that I feel like you have to really kind of learn when and how to capitalize when things are good and learning how to either make the best out of a bad situation,” said Payne, who started out with the Diamondbacks as an intern and has been there ever since. “I mean, we’ve had some really rough seasons while I’ve been here, and so I think that teaches you just as much about when and how to message certain things to fans as a winning season does.”
The Diamondbacks have had their up-and-down years during Payne’s tenure with the team, with platforms and people coming and going and evolving as much as the players on the roster. But talk to Payne, and there are undeniably foundational values the DBacks hold dear and a social media philosophy that is fungible but has a baseline that everyone on the team understands. It’s tempting to swing for the fences with every post and piece of content, but it’s important to know about the team you’re playing for before stepping up to the plate (yes, I love sports analogies). A common talking point integral to club cohesion is the process of onboarding new hires, especially those who will be speaking and creating on behalf of the brand that’ll be around longer than any one employee or player on the team.
“When we hire new people, we have a coordinator come in or an intern even, there is a gradual learning process of trial and error of, yep, that does sound like us or, you know, we might have to peel that back a little bit, or maybe we sound a little more excited for this play or this sort of moment,” described Payne, who gave hgih praise to his former boss, John Prewitt. “I would say it’s really critical for us to just still, I think, sound professional. I think that we’re we’re not someone that’s going to have a bunch of typos and grammatical mistakes and so casual that, you know, we might be alienating certain fans. I understand that that might also appeal to certain demographics, but I think we’ve just decided that we’re going to use proper grammar. We’re still going to try to use complete sentences when possible…
Payne continued: “We definitely take what I would call calculated risks from time to time, and there have been a lot over the years that I’ll either reach out to approval or bounce off of my counterparts or my trusted group of people that I really value their opinions around the organization and things like that or my bosses, whoever it is and kind of go, Hey, what do you think? Does this sound like us? Does this make sense? And sometimes we get the sign off and it goes great.”
What do you imagine when you think of risk taking in marketing, brand, and social media? It may be something of the ‘savage’ category, whether a snarky reply or trollish creative. It could be a tweak in copy and word choice, or decisions on elements of the game to feature. But what we’ve seen more in recent years are intentional, relatively omnichannel activations of ‘risks,’ activities that can redefine a brand and alter the way fans perceive the official personality of the team.
The ‘calculated’ part is meaningful, too. It just feels right — listening to fans, hearing the players and coaches — the vibes point you in the right direction. So as the Diamondbacks kept winning during the 2023 season, Payne and his colleagues and everybody around the team could feel something sizzling.
“I think [our authenticity] was what [drove] our success in the postseason with some of our videos that were definitely more out there in terms of what we had put out in the past,” said Payne, referencing the attitude-filled videos that broke through so well during the postseason. “They were a lot more aggressive, but it was authentic to us and the team. It was how the players were feeling, it was how the coaches were feeling; like they felt like, ‘Hey, we’re kind of being slighted here. People are underestimating us.’
“So the videos weren’t us creating some imaginary storyline that didn’t exist that we just thought would be funny, it was stuff that was actually being said, and it was hopefully portraying how our fan base felt, how our players felt, how our coaches felt, how our whole front office felt and I think that was why they ended up working.”
It was the videos that caught my eye more than anything. More than some trolling meme or some all lower-case snarky retort. That cohesiveness between what the social media team was seeing, what was coming from the players, and what made its way to the video producers working the cameras and the Premiere timelines culminated in content that made baseball fans realize the vibes the Diamondbacks are putting out there. This alignment and execution is worth examining and appreciating — because that attitude and those brand statements are so powerful when they’re consistent across fan touch points. There’s no magic to achieving such continuity, but you know it when you have it.
“We’re really fortunate to have developed a strong working relationship where it’s give and take and [the video production team] is contributing ideas for us, we’re contributing ideas for them,” said Payne. “So that’s how those videos for us, I think, all kind of started; it wasn’t necessarily we sat down one day and went like, we need to like create a video with this kind of thing. It was just, as we’re talking about projects over the course of a season, as the personalities for each of them shine through on different things trying to kind of just highlight that and play into it and not kind of run away from it or not try to sterilize the content that we’re doing.”
Things reached a pinnacle when the Diamondbacks took on their division rival the Los Angeles Dodgers. The Dodgers were the perennial winner, the team at the top everyone was always chasing, or so the narrative went. The DBacks could hear it, their players felt it, fans talked about it — and instead of retreating from the perceived inferiority syndrome, the ‘act like you’ve been there before’ aura — this generation of Diamondbacks players had not been there before, had not vanquished the empire in LA. So they leaned right into the conversations and, as Payne wonderfully put it, let the Diamondbacks ‘personality shine through our content.’
“There’s like a rivalry there,” said Payne of the matchup with the Dodgers. “It’s a little bit, you know, there’s that big brother-little brother syndrome that people like to talk about or whatever you call it. Whether or not that’s true, I don’t personally agree with it, but let’s talk about it, let’s have those conversations and then I think naturally your content kind of shines through with that.
“And our voice in terms of copy will be impacted by those conversations that we’re having. The videos will come through with maybe a little bit more of that edge or that kind of back and forth, the suspense — we acknowledge that there had been disappointments in the past in LA leading into that series. We didn’t run from the history, but then we had that history kind of helping us guide how we were going to continue creating stuff throughout that series. And then it paid off.”
While the long MLB season referenced earlier often means every emotion-fueled win streak is met by an equally emotional streak of losses, there is, for all intents and purposes, no tomorrow in the postseason, no lazy Wednesday afternoon getaway game against an East Coast cellar dweller. It’s a time to fire every bullet because that window of opportunity is open every day. Payne and his team recognized the moment, league championship runs don’t come very often. What the team did during those weeks could define the DBacks for a generation of lifelong fans.
“We kind of just were like every single day let’s just try to do the absolute best that we can highlighting today and if we run out of ideas down the road, then we’ll worry about that at that point…I think for us, we got we got kind of back to our basics a little bit by that time. But in the postseason it was just like, go all in all the time and we’ll rest when the season’s over.”
There are special times in sports when a team captures fans with rapt attention, emotions open and eyeballs on everything the team is putting out. Those are the moments when everybody on the team must be ready, operating with the same signals, because that’s where the biggest wins originate, the statements that can resonate with fans for years to come.
******************************************************************************
