Winning Theme Dominates Corporate Bashes

Super Bowl XXII will fade into history Sunday night, but Ford Motor Co.’s most impressive event of Super Bowl week won’t begin until Monday night.

Then, 1,100 of Ford’s most important dealers, customers and executives will gather in a lavishly decorated Coast Guard hangar at Lindbergh Field for a star-spangled bash that will include a military marching band, fireworks, exquisite food and star-quality entertainment.

The trappings will be lavish, but the message will be simple: Ford, the nation’s most profitable car company during 1987, believes that its guests are every bit as important as the football team that walks away with Super Bowl XXII rings Sunday.

That winning theme will be echoed at every corporate affair that is staged in San Diego during the coming week.

Corporations that attend the Super Bowl “want their people to know that they are the champions,” according to Gary Church, an executive with San Diego-based Patti Roscoe & Associates, which is arranging special events for several large corporations.

‘Week of One-Upmanship’

“This is a week of one-upmanship,” according to Vince Aspromonte, president of the San Diego-based Masters Group, which is helping stage Ford’s events.

Not surprisingly, many corporate officials prefer not to talk in detail about the seemingly nonstop string of parties that will be conducted largely behind closed--and guarded--doors. Some corporations have even extracted secrecy pledges from companies that will provide products and services for the more elaborate parties.

Despite that penchant for secrecy, the National Football League estimates that about 75% of the nation’s 500 largest corporations will use this year’s game in San Diego to entertain clients or reward their most valuable employees.

Companies known to be acting as Super Bowl hosts include: Ford, Chrysler Corp., General Electric, Anheuser-Busch, Adolph Coors Co., Miller Brewing and Sheraton Corp. Others include Hilton Hotels, Kraft, CBS-TV, Times Mirror (publisher of The Times), E.F. Hutton Group, Subaru of America, Allstate Insurance Cos., GTE Corp., Merrill Lynch, Searle Pharmaceuticals, Lever Brothers, NBC-TV, Seagrams and Sports Illustrated.

Most of those companies will provide their guests with round-trip airline tickets and lodging at premiere hotels. Those elite guests will attend luxurious parties and visit many of San Diego’s most popular tourist attractions. And they will be provided with tickets to The Game.

Before, during and after the game, 7,000 invited guests will be wined, dined and entertained at elaborate parties in the corporate tents that have been erected at the stadium.

Sports inc., a weekly magazine published by Times Mirror, recently reported that all of Ford’s guests will be at the corporate village--and all will have tickets to the Super Bowl. Chrysler Corp. will send 600 guests to the corporate village and the game, according to the magazine.

In just 22 years the Super Bowl has evolved into the “primo event” for corporations that use sporting events to motivate employees and reward customers, according to Aspromonte. Not even the venerable baseball World Series or motor racing’s Indianapolis 500 can compete with the relatively young Super Bowl.

The game serves as an extremely attractive carrot for “young, heavily male sales organizations that are aggressive in nature,” according to Don Farno, a vice president of E.F. MacDonald Motivation, a Gardena-based company that designs employee-incentive programs for corporations.

“The bottom line is that corporations want improved performance from their people, so the award must be structured to elicit improved performance,” according to Duane Christensen, director of corporate communications for Maritz Motivation, a St. Louis-based company that packages incentive and motivation programs for at least half of the Fortune 500.

‘Personifies Competition’

The National Football League’s annual championship game “isn’t necessarily a top-of-the-line event, but it personifies competition and competition is a major influence in a lot of programs that we do,” Farno said.

Not surprisingly, the Super Bowl’s allure to corporate America is directly linked to the game’s stature as “the single biggest media hype event of the year,” according to Aspromonte.

Corporations will be trying to harness that hype to increase the luster of their own parties and events.

To that end, Ford will be host to its most important event on the day after Super Bowl Sunday. That scheduling trick means that Ford’s guests will attend the “last big event . . . of the biggest sporting event that is held in the U.S.,” Aspromonte said.

So as the sun rises Monday morning and the rest of corporate America heads home, Ford’s guests will still have another day--and another fabulous party--in America’s Finest City.

By Monday, Ford’s guests will have eaten at the city’s best restaurants, cruised the Pacific Ocean in search of whales and visited San Diego’s abundant collection of natural and man-made attractions.

On Saturday night, Ford’s guests will enjoy a swank dinner and the Frank Sinatra/Liza Minnelli concert at the Sports Arena. And on Super Bowl Sunday, Ford will wine and dine its guests at the largest corporate tent in the hospitality village that surrounds San Diego Jack Murphy Stadium.

During Monday night’s affair, the U.S. Navy Marching Band will perform and skipper Dennis Conner--who last year reclaimed the America’s Cup sailing trophy--will narrate movies of that victory.

The centerpiece for Ford’s unabashedly patriotic affair will be Stars & Stripes, the 12-meter yacht that Conner skippered to victory in Australia.

Fireworks Display

Ford will end its Monday night affair by lighting up the sky over San Diego Bay with fireworks.

If that display sounds expensive, it is.

“You probably could send a group to Hawaii for a week for the money you’d spend on three days at Super Bowl,” according to Church, who is helping to package events for Chrysler, Allstate, GTE, Subaru and E.F. Hutton.

But all things are relative, according to another planner who suggested that a corporation could easily spend more money on 50 guests than 500--depending on what the program entails.

Corporate guests in San Diego will do what tourists typically do. Cruise boats on San Diego Harbor are booked. There will be trips to Mexico. The San Diego Zoo and Sea World are expecting record crowds, and it is impossible to book a reservation at San Diego’s finest restaurants.

Access to Lavish Parties

But the corporate chosen also will enjoy access to lavish parties throughout San Diego.

Those parties will feature big-name entertainment. During past Super Bowls, for example, Ford’s guests have been entertained by the Beach Boys and various Motown groups.

There will be countless theme parties--with the venerable beach party as the dominant theme.

“There are 75,000 people (here) to see the game, but each client wants you to make it seem like they’re the only company in town,” Church said.

Consequently, ballrooms around the county will be transformed into beach parties where sand sculptors will create monoliths featuring corporate emblems--while surf band play and bikini-clad waitresses serve drinks and food.

Other corporations will play host to “fiestas” with mariachi bands and margaritas. One company is believed to be readying a one-ring circus for its guests.

There will also be formal, black- and white-tie award dinners. In between the meals and parties, some business will even be conducted.

“Just going to the game isn’t enough,” acknowledged John Nystrom, Nissan’s New York-based director of merchandising. “We try to do something a little novel, even if we’re not going to be unique.”

For past Super Bowls, Nissan has chartered ocean liners to serve as a floating hotel for its guests. “And it’s nice if you can throw in tickets on the 50-yard line,” Nystrom quipped.

Nissan is not sending a delegation to Super Bowl XXII. But the company has attended several past games and will participate in the festivities at future games.

Late last year, rumors began to circulate that Nissan and other companies were boycotting Super Bowl XXII because the cost of attending has skyrocketed.

Nystrom, however, said Nissan begged off “because once you’ve been there a few times in a row, it might start to lose its ability to motivate.”

But some companies evidently are not getting put off by ever-increasing costs.

“For the money that (corporations) spend on bringing their people to San Diego for a few days they could probably afford to send them to Hawaii, Europe or the Orient,” one meeting planner said. “But the allure of the Super Bowl is such that they’ll (continue to) spend the money.”

In addition to the obvious glamour that surrounds the game, there are practical reasons why corporations are drawn to the game and its attendant festivities.

To start, “at this time of the year, there aren’t that many places you can go because of the weather,” according to Church.

And, corporations are extremely receptive to relatively compact events that don’t keep their top performers out of action for extended periods of time.

That’s not to say all companies view attendance at the Super Bowl as mandatory.

Several years ago, Aspromonte worked with a beer company that decided not to send its top distributors to Los Angeles for the Super Bowl.

“We suggested that for the same amount of money they could go to Palm Springs for five days of golf and recreation,” Aspromonte said. “On game day, we took over the main ballroom and had a massive Super Bowl party with wide-screen TVs.”

Motivational experts agree that the hustle and hype that surround the Super Bowl will turn off certain employees and customers.

“You have to work with the client to understand what their business is, where their people would fit in, and what your objective is,” Christensen said.

Some younger, health-conscious employees might prefer an individualized incentive program that rewards top performers with a stay at a posh spa. Others move into high gear to win a stay at an exclusive athletic club where they can work on their tennis or golf games.

A top salesman with an interest in fishing might be rewarded with a weeklong stay in the Alaskan wilderness--with his own guide and airplane at hand. A top performer with an interest in sailing might be packed off on a 50-foot yacht with a crew and a chef.

“New, exciting and different are the key words,” according to Christensen. “You might go to Australia, Hong Kong or Yugoslavia, places where people haven’t been before.”

If the destination is fairly common--England or France, perhaps--meeting planners develop little twists, including a dinner in the House of Commons or a stay in a French chateau.

“The key is to develop something that appeals to your group,” Christensen said. “In San Diego, that will be no problem because you’ve got the ocean, Mexico and the weather. That wasn’t the case in Detroit a few years ago.”