Establishing Team Brand

[waialua359]

Locally, our team is very well known as "Waialua" and not our team number. But with respect to the CD and FRC Community, its always been "359" and "Hawaiian Kids" for sure. Most people cant even pronounce our school name correctly anyway.
We have a generic name because 16 years back when FRC was relatively much smaller than it is today, its how other teams recognized us with our (never caught dead wearing our red aloha shirt in public) shirts.
In fact, we got to be good friends with Team 25 in NJ and went to their regional in 2007, because we found out they bought their shirts from the exact same vendor in Hawaii.
School names are hard. I can remember about 800+ different teams by their number, but cant name schools but a handful of them.

[StAxis]

We work really hard to make sure we keep a consistent and professional brand that is fun and recognizable. We got lucky, our founders using the name Exploding Bacon gave us a great unique jumping point since it's something that is hard to forget. I think my number one recommendation is figure out something about your team that you can make hard to forget. If it's orange and green and a pig on a rocket, awesome, if it's going by Waialua instead of 359, also awesome!

I think the most important thing to remember is that no matter how many places you go and do outreach, you won't make much progress unless people remember you after they leave, so give them something unique to remember you by.

If you're interested in more information on branding and marketing your team we have presented our Big Bacon Theory workshop many times over the years. It covers everything we believe to be crucial in maintaining a strong image in both your FIRST and local communities.

You can find those here:http://www.explodingbacon.com/resour...-bacon-theory/

Good luck! If you have any questions feel free to ask, always love to help!