In ”After big slump, Sox become marketing hit,” Bruce Buursma told us that in the five seasons prior to 1990, when White Sox attendance was steadily declining year after year, ”marketing Chicago`s tattered Sox and Comiskey`s battered image was as daunting an assignment as could be found in professional sports.”
But whereas Buursma`s judgment was correct, his reason for the negative images of ”tattered” Sox and ”battered” Comiskey was entirely false.
If, according to Buursma, marketing the White Sox over the past several seasons has been well-nigh impossible, the reason lay not in management`s lack of commitment to marketing its product, but in how management went about marketing it-negatively, so as to dissuade fans from wanting to renovate the old Comiskey Park.
Thus, the fact that the image of the Sox could seem ”tattered,” and that of Comiskey ”battered,” wasn`t the unintended result of a lack of marketing, much less even poor marketing.
Rather, it was the intended result of a strategy designed by management since 1984 to convince the State of Illinois that Comiskey was doomed, so that either Illinois would agree to replace it with a new stadium or the Sox would find another state that would.
