New sponsors - LTC Powered Access

FYI.....

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Link to their site.....

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There's the cheap scaffolding quote for the HHP non development sorted then !!

Wonderful!!

Fans get the striped shirt they asked for and then the club stick another hideous orange blob in the middle of it.

Oh well that will save me 40 odd quid.

It's £40 Argyle won't get from me either. It's more to do with how the stripes were chosen than any logo though.

Don't get me wrong the utter shit Puma provided was worse but stripes were a minority choice on PASOTI but were 'pushed' onto Argyle by that vocal and influential minority. There was no mandate for a change to stripes.

On the logo issue I note there's again, as with Ginsters, a bizarre notion floating round on PASOTI that the sponsors should change their branded colours to fit our shirt! Talk about the tail wagging the dog, why the hell should people paying a large sum to advertise their product and get their brand identity over to a wider audience be expected to dilute that identity just to make a shirt more 'acceptable'. I find that mindset bizarre.

I would think the basic requirement for any shirt sponsor is to have their logo clearly visible and in the correct colours.

Lets not fool ourselves..... the sponsor is selling his product....he hasn't got to be in a love affair with  PAFC.

I quite like the shirt and the way that the sponsors logo is blended to be as hidden as much as possible. If I was the sponsor though, I would now be considering removing my sponsorship.

I think LTC will be a good sponsor. I haven't seen the new kit yet but when they sponsored the Youth Team a while back their logo on those shirts looked good so I don't see why the new shirt won't.

On the other hand the whole thing strikes me as the public face of yet another debacle within the higher echelons of the club.

The plea made by Sparksy during his Pompey commentary struck me as desperate at the time and on reflection I see no reason to re-assess my instant judgement. That plea could only mean that either negotiations with Bond (as genuinely a supportive sponsorship from long-standing and genuine Argyle fans) were late starting and then collapsed because either the terms were unreasonable (maybe the club was loading on the lost income from FES?) or the relationship between Bond and Argyle had deteriorated for some other reason without one of the parties letting the other know. Either way this is very bad. Very bad indeed.

Then comes the welcome appointment of LTC some considerable time later. LTC's previous involvement means that they have, probably, never really been very far from the club and Marketing would certainly have had their details on file for years. So if they were the "preferred" sponsor (I don't believe for a moment that they were) why weren't they tied up ages ago? And if they weren't then the suggestion lingers in my mind that they have stepped in to fill the void of no sponsorship, and thus avert a mini-income crisis, just as Bond did before them.

Obviously this is all complete speculation but if it is true, and I'll happily wager it's not far off the mark, then it raises a few pertinent questions:

Why did Bond withdraw?
Why did Bond withdraw so late in the day?
If their withdrawal was known well in advance why was nobody lined up to replace them?
Is our Marketing that shoddy that we have to rely on local radio appeals?
Or was it well-flagged in advance but nobody at the club did anything about it?

We often hear testimony to what a brilliant businessman James Brent is but the loss of an important income stream and the, possible, collapse of relationship with a dedicated long-term benefactor suggests that somebody somewhere did not have their eye on the ball and the arrival of LTC as a sponsor appears to be extremely reactive instead of welcomingly proactive.

And none of this addresses the impact of reduced income due to delayed shirt sales. Had the new shirts been on sale we might not have needed to go cap-in-hand to Wrathall and Brent might not have handed over 5% of the club for the privilege of so doing.

There's big issues at play here which strike at the heart of the club's aptitude for professional governance and good management (at boardroom level) which far out-weigh any minor kerfuffle about the shade of green or whether we wear stripes or not. We ran up £17m of debt due to a mixture of ambitiously planned property development, incompetence and negligence. "We took our eye off the ball" they said. Sadly the lessons that ought to be carved into the club's DNA regarding watching the sodding round thing do not yet seem to have been learned.

There. All of that without reference to the hideous and unwanted blue away kit or the inability of the club to get shirts sized appropriately according the label on them or in the sizes that people want to buy.

If you can't get something as basic as the team shirt right then there's little hope for anything else.

And they wonder why we're cynical!

Sometimes the very real prospect of the club being unable to arrange a piss-up in a brewery surfaces all too blatantly and this is another of them.

Those sensible engineering types at LTC are having a vote on their website (see OP for link) as to how logo is shown on shirt.

Either as their corporate identity with orange surround or as white on green background to fit into shirt design. Our resident marketing expert must be in despair of them.

edit to add afterthought. Graham Clark has suggested that LTC demonstrate their capabilities by helping remove NWO badges from back of Demport. If Nikkk decides to wind up FES to concentrate on FIL there could be a bigger job to be done.

The orange logo looks better. Not only that it is their brand - if they have paid they should stamp whatever colour they like on.

However this is from someone who could never understand the constant 'red blob' whinging of Argyle fans about Ginsters. I always thought that logo looked brilliant on our shirts.

Give them their due - thay are actually asking the fans!! Well done LTC!!  

LTC must be mad to be willing to change it to Green. Their logo becomes inconspicuous on the shirt.

Is this a case where someone in power at LTC is a Argyle fan?

The green one looks stupid to me. Dont mind the orange. Sponsors logos have been around for so long now it's just accepted that the front/back/collar of any shirt will be defaced.

I've own one Argyle shirt, it's a ginsters, I've only worn it a couple of times and now I hate it. It's cheap nylon, not waterproof, doesn't keep you warm and sweats when it's hot. It was expensive and it's crap. I feckin hate replica shirts. I bet he tried Wonga first.

My Gran knitted me a scarf in the early seventies, when she have it to me first it was about four feet long, after a couple of seasons it was about fourteen feet long, you could have got loads of advertising on there.

ejh wrote:

The orange logo looks better. Not only that it is their brand - if they have paid they should stamp whatever colour they like on.

However this is from someone who could never understand the constant 'red blob' whinging of Argyle fans about Ginsters. I always thought that logo looked brilliant on our shirts.

Agree with you there  

Rickler wrote:

LTC must be mad to be willing to change it to Green. Their logo becomes inconspicuous on the shirt.

Is this a case where someone in power at LTC is a Argyle fan?

The owner is - he's a good bloke, actually. I went to an all-day meeting there once, and the guest of honour at lunch was Alan Judge (bless).

I suspect the reason LTC are prepared to negotiate the colour of their logo is that each division has the same logo but on a different colour background - powered access is orange, scaffolding's yellow etc. So they're not quite so reliant on being recognised by their colours as other companies.

woeful but typical argyle im afraid.

somebody at HP get a f**king grip on the running of the club FFS !

Actually, if your going to sponsor a football team, surely you will want as many people as possible to wear the shirt with your logo on it. If your logo completely turns fans off buying the shirt in the first place, that defeats the object. You can't advertise your company on shirts if nobody will buy the shirt. Changing the colours to encourage fans to buy the shirt may be the sensible option.

It's more about the fan helping out the club that he supports because he can, I doubt that LTC are announcing a big recruitment drive for staff to co incide with the shirt release FFS!

X Isle wrote:

FYI.....

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Link to their site.....

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Who ??

Peggy wrote:

Rickler wrote:

LTC must be mad to be willing to change it to Green. Their logo becomes inconspicuous on the shirt.

Is this a case where someone in power at LTC is a Argyle fan?

The owner is - he's a good bloke, actually. I went to an all-day meeting there once, and the guest of honour at lunch was Alan Judge (bless).

I suspect the reason LTC are prepared to negotiate the colour of their logo is that each division has the same logo but on a different colour background - powered access is orange, scaffolding's yellow etc. So they're not quite so reliant on being recognised by their colours as other companies.

Thanks Peggy..

That's an interesting marketing strategy - it seems to go against conventional wisdom?

Personally, I hope the green logo makes it onto the shirt. It hardly looks like we have advertising!

It's a no-brainer that we're going to end up with the green one.

Actually it isn't bad marketing at all. Nobody'll be put off buying a shirt, the company will get good press from listening and the company name will be out there.

I mentioned earlier that they sponsored the youth team in the FAY Cup a year or two back so a very small scale outlay there succeeded in bringing their name to my attention and I often notice their vans out on the road now. Before they didn't register.

From an LTC perspective this looks like a great deal to me. From a commercial perspective for the club it resembles a disaster.

Is anybody up there marketing anything?

We haven't had a commercial manager since budgie left about three or four years ago, it shows.

Maybe that's it.

A club, any club, in Argyle's position simply has to up its game commercially.

Income is everything.

So apart from the Big Ticket items like admission price and shirt sales the club should be actively engaging with local businesses much more. It should be selling programme ad space, advertising hoardings in the ground, sponsorship packages for players, matchball, matchday and, frankly, loads more besides.

How many times do we see a last minute plea for a match sponsor, no matchball sponsor at all, shortage of player sponsorships and so on?

I've never bothered to track these things but even once is too often.

Still I suppose the £50 quid here, £500 there is hardly worth the bother when the HHP development stands to hit £20m, does it?

It couldn't really be clearer what the priorities are and, sadly, PAFC is not at #1.