Finding Your Demographic = Everything

Whoever the new owner(s) of the Thrashers might be (we do know who it is, cause that's how we roll), he/they will have to give some serious thought to improving the Thrashers' branding and marketing. Hopefully, they'll spend a lot of time thinking about the Thrashers' target demographic, i.e. the sort of people who live around here and might want to go see some hockey.

The new marketing team shouldn't limit their reach to measly old Fulton and Dekalb Counties. They need to embrace the entire population of our state, and perhaps even the entire non-North Carolina Southeast. At the very least, EVERYONE in Georgia should know about the Thrashers.

Who are these people? All diabetics, apparently, at least according to a new study by the American Journal of Preventive Medicine:



A swath of the Deep South and Appalachia has emerged as the U.S. “diabetes belt,” researchers find. County-by-county mapping shows that the highest rates of diabetes cut two paths—one strung through Tennessee, Kentucky and West Virginia, and another running eastward from Louisiana through Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia and South Carolina.

Excellent. THIS is why the Thrashers don't draw enough fans: they've never known how to market themselves to Georgia's large diabetic population literally everyone who lives around here.

We need new slogans ("a corn-syrupy good time!"), new uniforms (the brown thrasher should be fried), and maybe even a major re-modeling of Philips Arena to make it look more like a Snickers bar.



I could really use a sugary drink right about now.