NFL season (its preseason, at least) is finally under way. NFL football is arguably one of the biggest cultural forces in sports: They build identity in their cities and they set the perception for what their cities look like.
I attended the Cleveland Browns preseason game this weekend, and their own portrayal of the city and its football fans remains a mix of photos filled with hard hats and freight trains as opposed to scrubs and hospital towers. So, in the hope of injecting a little healthcare marketing strategy into the NFL season, I’m re-running a post from December 2010 below to remind the sports franchises of the world that today’s NFL cities — from Philadelphia to Cleveland to Minneapolis to Seattle — are more about healthcare than they are manufacturing.
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December 27, 2010 — One knock against this year’s Cleveland Browns is that their offense is from a bygone era: three yards and a cloud of dust in a time of high-flying aerial attacks.
The way they portray their city is from another era, too.
I’ve been to about a half-dozen home games this season and I always shake my head at a video I’ve seen during most games just before kickoff. It’s a montage of Browns footage and fans, who are often portrayed as hard-hatted manufacturing types.
That’s a comparison of Cleveland from around the Jim Brown years. But not today. The Browns don’t pay a second’s worth of tribute to today’s Cleveland, which is a medical city not a manufacturing one. There are no fist-pumping nurses in Browns scrubs. No footage of a cardiovascular surgeon removing a Steelers fan’s heart. A skit with some EMS workers in Browns jerseys dumping alcohol-poisoned tailgaters into an ambulance would at least be something.
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Consider this:
- Healthcare surpassed manufacturing to become the region’s No. 1 employer more than three years ago.
- Much of the manufacturing left in this town is fueled by the medical industry. More than 600 companies in Ohio — many of them manufacturing companies — have registered with the U.S. Food and Drug Administration for medical devices.
- If you look at the paid placement in Cleveland Browns Stadium, a major chunk of it is from the healthcare industry.
It really wouldn’t matter except that cities like Cleveland need a shot of confidence. Integrating healthcare marketing strategies throughout a city is one way to deliver that shot. Plus, throwback narratives paying homage to manufacturing stand in the way of realizing healthcare is an economic and cultural force — not just in Cleveland, but in cities all over the country: from Duluth, Minnesota, to Wichita, Kansas, to Winston-Salem, North Carolina, where healthcare has caught up to and blown past manufacturing as a local employer.
When NBA superstar LeBron James came back to Cleveland for the first time, hosts on a local sports talk show complained the national media made Cleveland sound like a place where everyone emerged from dank coal plants and steel mills, drank themselves silly and got ready to bash some skulls.
The Browns don’t do that. Far from it. They pay homage to hard-working blue collar workers who a generation ago helped build the city. But it doesn’t help move anyone into 2010, either.
Cleveland is the hospital capital of the world. The Browns — at least to anyone there who isn’t selling advertising space — portray a city still run by LTV Steel.
[Photo courtesy of Flickr user ElvertBarnes]