Request denied
By: Ian Rose | April 18th, 2009I received this email today from ICT:
Ian,
As you will appreciate the crest is part of the club’s intellectual property rights and as such is licensed to a number of commercial partners for their use. In the circumstances we are unable to grant you the right to use the crest.
Regards
Mike Smith
Chief Executive
ICTFC
Of course, I’m disappointed. I liked to believe until now that the reach of the FootballDataCo culture, the idea that total brand control rather than outreach is the way for football to move forward, hadn’t quite yet spread to Inverness. Mike Smith’s email tells me otherwise. And though I am disappointed, I’m not disappointed in the club. Executives come and go, as do business strategies and ideas. They are temporary, and they represent the club itself in only the most legal sense. The club is more than its current leadership. As I told Smith and the rest of the front office in the initial email, they are fully within their legal rights to deny use of the crest. The easiest thing for me to do now would be to criticize them and rant about how their short-sighted, old-media ideas are holding them back, but what this comes down to is a simple disagreement. I believe that the club is better off spreading its brand than protecting it, and better off embracing its fans than not. The front office is more conservative in their views, wanting control of the brand in an internet age where that is increasingly difficult, maybe impossible.
The Wolves Offside held a contest to decide their new Offside crest, and though that’s a tempting idea, I don’t think that’s what I’m going to do. To be honest, this blog is not primarily for Caley Thistle fans. It caters mostly to football fans in general, and attempts to give Caley Thistle a place at the table in terms of the new media coverage that the big clubs take for granted. And so, I’ll be choosing a new crest for the Caley Offside. Any suggestions are welcome, and thanks for your support.
Category: Caley Thistle Team News
Subscribe
|
Print
|
Share
      |
Comments
-
Boo! Boo!
Posted from
United States
-
Thumbs down for ICT.
It might be a good idea over the summer though for us all to start designing the crests we’d rather use. At least untill, you know they try and stop us using the club names too.
Posted from
United States -
As someone who hopes to see the Scottish League and Scottish teams (with certain…*ahem* exceptions), this is a mistake by Caley. While I understand that the crest is the club’s intellectual property, it is pretty clear Ian or anyone else at the offside is not reaping huge profits from the use of the crests. Furthermore, I would think a club that struggles to fill their grounds to 50% capacity would be open to trying expand their fan base. You would think that a blog like the offside that is held in such high regard and widely read would be a good way to do this. Clubs like Man U, Chelsea, and even Celtic and Rangers might not have to worry about “brand recognition”, but I would think that smaller clubs like Caley would jump at the chance to get more recognition internationally. But what do I know…
Posted from
United States -
At least Caley could be arsed to respond though.
Posted from
United States
Comments are closed
Home 
