An All-American Opportunity

This is going to be an interesting year for the Houston Astros.  Not because of what they are likely to do on the field.  Far from it.  Coming off their worst-ever season in 2011, with 106 losses, the Astros are unlikely to offer much competition to their divisional rivals.  But they are going through major changes -- perhaps the largest changes they have experienced in their 50-year franchise history -- that will change the way the team behaves off the field.

The most significant of these changes is that the Astros have new ownership, led by Jim Crane, who has brought in new business leadership and new front office management to the franchise.  Additionally, this will be the last season that the Astros play in the National League.  In 2013, they will move to the American League to help balance baseball with 15 teams in each league and 5 in each of three divisions per league. (Currently, there are 16 teams in the National League, with 6 in the NL Central.  The Astros will move from the Central to the 4-team AL West).

While this is undeniably a challenge, especially considering the team's on-field shortcomings, the Astros are instead choosing to look at this as an opportunity to upgrade their branding and operations.  That upgrade could include the cosmetic, such as new uniforms, as well as policies and procedures that affect the game day experience inside Minute Maid Park and how the team interacts with customers outside the ball park.  The only thing that seems to be off the table is that the team is going to keep "Astros" as its nickname.

The Astros realized that they couldn't do this alone, and so they have organized an interactive research campaign with Major League Baseball Advanced Media (MLBAM), to help them interact with a variety of different consumers of the Astros product.  The benefits of such an undertaking are both direct and indirect.  Directly, the franchise will improve on several subjects that fans and consumers have found lacking.  Indirectly, the use of fan-based research helps create better engagement with fans and, hopefully, more satisfaction because the fans believe that the franchise is open to hearing their issues and suggestions.

Opportunities to create these kinds of major reorganizations are extremely rare.  They can only exist at times of major change -- change in ownership, change in location or arena, change in function (such as switching to another league), and so on.  For the Astros, several of these are occurring at once, and considering that they are joining a division with the Rangers and Angels and leaving one that has the Pirates and Cubs, the climb to once again becoming a healthy franchise off-the-field seems a lot less daunting than that of becoming a winning team on the field.