Marketing Redux - Topps
Baseball is truly an American institution that is enjoyed and shared from generation to generation, father to son to grandson. Who doesn't have an emotional connection with baseball?
Think back to the memory of walking into a major league ballpark for the first time, seeing the field of green grass and feeling so small in such a huge stadium. For many, this connection that lasts a lifetime starts in their youth through collecting baseball cards. Recall the joy of our heroes coming to life on a simple piece of cardboard that we savored and looked at for hours at a time. I've been lucky enough to share the simple joy of sports card collecting with my son.
Growing up in the innocent world of the mid-sixties, Topps, for me, was the preeminent card manufacturer - in fact, the only one. For a nickel, you got ten cards and a stick of bubblegum. You tore open each pack in the quest to find players from your favorite team and the stars - the likes of Mickey Mantle, Willie Mays, Pete Rose, Tom Seaver and many others. Summer days seemed to last forever, flipping and trading cards and using them as noisemakers on the spokes of our Spider bikes with banana seats. A great time, with memories that can never be replicated in our adult lives.
Much had changed in the sports card collecting business by the time my son got into it in the 90's. Topps was no longer the brand leader. Upper Deck ruled the day with their glossy premium product with "chase" autograph and uniform cards. At the time, the price point for their pack was 99 cents versus 49 cents for Topps and the other also ran brands - Donruss, Fleer and Score. Card collecting lost its innocence. Speculators entered the category. Rookie cards appreciated in value far beyond anyone's wildest imagination. The very cards I grew up with in the 60's were worth several thousand dollars. Of course, mine are in a landfill somewhere, having been culled by my mother who deemed them worthless. Packs grew increasingly more expensive - to as high as $5 to $10 per pack. Kid collectors were driven out by those seeking a quick buck. You had to have money to be a player in the 90's sports card market.
The trading card business was booming, thanks in part to all the packs I bought for my son. But it was short lived. According to Sports Illustrated and Sports Collectors Digest, the sports card trading industry hit a high of $1.2 billion in 1991. That number plummeted to $400 million at the beginning of the decade and it is now at roughly $200 million. The category of card retailers got drilled as well. If you were in the business, it was sobering.
It was a case of the category eating itself. Everyone got greedy - the card manufacturers chasing profits and releasing too many sets, the speculators driving the price out of reach and the sports card buying public interested only in "chase" cards which offered an autograph or a swatch of a jersey. It was no longer about collecting for the sake of collecting. No one wanted to have a complete set. Economics ate the sports card industry inside out.
Perhaps there is a sign of better times coming in the sports trading card segment. Major League Baseball announced recently that starting in 2010 they are awarding the exclusive rights to produce trading cards with MLB logos and nicknames to Topps. It is as if the sports trading card industry is having a marketing do-over. They are going back to where they started by limiting distribution and not allowing all the card manufacturers to have MLB rights. They are practicing channel management by not over saturating the market with too much product that forces deflated prices and worthless product stock that sports card stores can't even give away. Can they go back to the way it was? Probably not. With better channel policies and exclusive relationships with card manufacturers, the industry may be on the road back. It's got a long, long way to go.
Talk about memories, and a much simpler way of life. Clothes pinning the cards to your bike tires - I had a cool banana seat bike as well - and trying to boondoogle your friends into making a card trade that you would never make yourself. My mother also thought my shoebox filled with baseball cards was just taking up space and they ended up in the dump. And I thought they might help pay for part of a college education.
Poor channel management and over saturation also doomed the Pokemon card craze of the 1990s. Initially available only in trading card stores, they had perceived value among the grammar school set. As soon as they became available in drug stores like CVS and Walgreens and department stores like Walmart and Target, the bloom was off the rose. But the plethora of their distribution back then will probably negate any significant increase in their value in the near term.
I told my son to keep those Pokemon cards, anyways. Who knows, maybe they'll be worth something when he has kids. If so, with the rising cost of college tuition, he could trade them in for one semester of school, if that.
Remember the team pictures, where the photos were so small that you literally could not make out any individual in the photograph? I'm not surprised that the card market emulated the real world of sports. As always its all about the bucks. As for me, I bought cards as a kid for the gum, and the fact that the cards smelled like gum for at least three weeks afterwards. Those days, sadly, are gone forever.
What a great blog entry!!! It brings back so many memories of collecting baseball cards with my friends. 2 of my friends used to run their own baseball card "show" every couple weeks. They made their own surprise packs, sold individual cards, etc.
Thanks Bill!
I loved the flat bubble gum with that white powder on pink gum. Even great when it was stale a crumbled. Kept my cards in a shoebox under my bed and loved flipping them.
A point, definition and memory.
This portrayal of the trading card industry is reflective of so many areas of life now versus then. Loss of Innocense. Overkill.
Definition of a good pack of baseball cards -- Any pack that did not include doubles of a card you already owned.
Playing baseball games against my brother in which a pitcher card was tossed underhand to waiting batter card. The field was an oriental rug. Hey, we didn't have Nintendo. But we did have imagination.
I won a big boxfull of cards in the late 50's early sixties with my killer flip. Sadly, like Bill, my parents thought that box a worthless hunk of clutter and out it went. Think Maury Wills, Mickey Mantle, Duke Snyder, Harmon Killebrew, Johnny Callison, Yogi Bera. The list goes on. BTW, Bill, it was more of a slab of bubblegum, a card-shaped slab. Often stale, so it cracked when you tryied to cram the thing into your mouth.
Wish I could say my cards survived, but in the result of space saving and clutter removal when I went to college, the cards were not spared...except for a secret stash they didn't find. That stash included all my hockey cards (easy Bill), while not as valuable as baseball, valuable none-the-less to a die hard hockey fan, especially when you land your favorite team's future franchise player rookie card...Yes, Mr. Raymond Bourque. One of the few that will be worth any money.
The exclusivity to Topps is forcing runner ups such as Upper Deck, as Bill said who used to rule the roost, into desperate measures by including pieces of memorabilia in their packs. Stuff like pieces of Papi's jersey, Tito's bubble gum wrapper, etc. Definite signs of desperation. Usually you see industries thwart monopolies, instead, the trading card industry is creating one.