PR Consultant: Vikings Will Bounce Back From Peterson Crisis
MINNEAPOLIS (WCCO) -- The fallout continues in the aftermath of Adrian Peterson's departure from the Minnesota Vikings.
While the team has removed most of Peterson's presence from its website, Peterson is still featured in both the still images and animations for the team's new $1 billion stadium.
And at the stadium construction site, his life-size image is displayed repeatedly on posters that surround the area.
It's very tough since Adrian Peterson is a superstar and a household name. The Vikings simply don't have any other player at that level -- on and off the playing field.
When the Vikings announced last Friday they were benching Peterson for the New England game, the ticket broker Ticket King had to lower the price they were charging for secondary-market tickets by 40 percent.
"There were ... a fair amount of fans that, my sense is, that said, 'You know what, I just don't want to be part of that,'" said Michael Nowakowski, president of Ticket King.
He says ticket prices for future games are also down by 15 percent.
"Fans want to see what shakes out out of this whole issue before, you know, they invest the kind of money that it costs to go to an NFL game," he said.
Peterson was the face on the ticket for the New England game. The faces on other tickets may be star players, but they're not nearly as well known.
"He's the marquee player," Nowakowski said. "He's really the only marquee player on the team."
Jon Austin, a public relations consultant who specializes in crisis situations, says the Peterson saga is a lesson for all corporations.
"This illustrates the risk of investing your identity corporately in an individual's identity," Austin said. "If you ever do get a time when you want to unwind it, it's very difficult to do when your face is on the signs, when it's in computer graphics that are all over the internet, when you're on banners and posters and programs."
He says. however, the Vikings will bounce back.
"This is not an existential threat to the Vikings. It's a distraction. It's a black eye," he said.
And he says there is ultimately something that can make a rebound happen faster.
"What we've learned in Minnesota is winning cures everything," Nowakowski said. "So if the team were to come out and play real well for a couple weeks, all of a sudden the Adrian Peterson situation wouldn't be on people's minds."
Austin says another lesson from this saga is that the Vikings should have carefully considered the fact that Adrian Peterson had a number of young children with a number of different women.
It's a situation that had the potential to create problems for Peterson, and ultimately the team.
