The naming of the Utah Mammoth
TSN: Utah Mammoth owner Ryan Smith was on the Pat McAfee show discussing the process of naming the team.
** NHLRumors.com transcription
Pat McAfee: How was the survey process, which you are a survey person, in the modern world that we’re in, with the name of a sports team. Which can be hated on, like, people can hate versions. Like, for sure, people can
hate on.”
Smith: “Well in like, so I think looking back, like, you guys were right. Like it was, it was high risk, high reward, or maybe even high risk, low reward, for the way that you would go through it. Qualtrics was pretty money throughout this process because we did the digital polling. We would randomize.
And then, the real kind of moment of truth came when we went back to the NHL, and we’re like, ‘Hey, we got to put some logos and brand identity towards this’. And so we we really created, like, four different, fully built out brands, you know. And it was Outlaw, and it was others, and Mammoth. And, and then we started going around, and the NHL was not having that. We would go out and show these to people.
And then anything you came out with, people started registering the hashtags, the websites. Like everyone, started registering the trademarks on all this stuff, which got super, like complicated.
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So it was really cool. We actually embedded all of the research into iPads. We want, we had, we had a home stretch of (Utah) Jazz, hockey games for the first time ever in Utah that were 11 games back-to-back. So we swapped out every single night. And we ended up walking around and we would get 1000s of people to come in, and it was only a couple people with Google glasses that actually leaked it. I mean, you got to plan for everything.
But Mammoth every night, Mammoth started taking off, and it was growing at like 10% a night. Where people, it’s almost like till they had to narrow it down, and they had to really get opinionated about it, and they actually had to choose that it got real. And then kind of everything fell into place where this is a brand.
Like, think of a Hockey Club. We dropped Hockey Club off. We actually built the brand, but it’s pretty vanilla, and the the fans ran with it. They’re the clubbers. They’re doing all this now, we’re giving them like a strong identity.”
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