As a small business owner you struggle and toil to build up your business.  Growing trust and customer relationships and trying to reach a critical mass of both success and from a marketing perspective, perceived success are vital to your future.  So it is understandable that when you take a big financial gamble and invest a large sum of money to sponsor an NFL team like the Philadelphia Eagles.  If you are a company like TastyKakes, you are really hoping to capitalize on the goodwill of the team, its great players like Donovan McNabb and maybe even the prestige that is associated with the NFL.   

What you do NOT expect is to be blind sided by having your marketing dollars go towards funding part of Michael Vick, infamous bare handed dog killer, and his new 2 year $6.8 million deal while he’s fresh out of prison and still on parole!

Unless you are in the business of selling knock off Jerseys, no small business owner in their right mind would want to be within a million miles of Michael Vick.

Tastykakes are no fly by not operation that is looking to make a quick buck on a marketing campaign either.  They have been around for almost 100 years in the Philadelphia history and have a lot of past success with other American past times such as sponsoring the Phillies and the Philadelphia Flyers in the NHL.

Even Janet Evanovich has helped ad to their fame and mystique by featuring their products in almost every Stephanie Plum novel written.  Stephanie Plum is a female bounty hunter with a hamster named Rex and an inherited dog named Bob.

So what do you do when your local team that you recently started sponsoring hires the NFLs most infamous and unliked player straight out of prison?

Tastykake has invested a lot of time and marketing and planning in their Eagles campaign.  Everything from graphic design work to gift tins for their products.  They sponsor a number of charitable organizations, and in general seem like a good company (healthiness of their products aside).  Now despite their modest history, they have grown into a sizable business grossing over $250 million per year, which explains their financial ability to back the Eagles in addition to other local sports teams.

But that money hasn’t necessarily prepared them for other modern challenges in marketing, such as establishing social media profiles, updating their website or keeping things running smoothly with a tight communications plan.  Typically, they shouldn’t need to, they sell snack foods!

But now those $250 million in Tastykake snack food sales are helping to line the pockets of a guy with a 6 year history of running illegal gambling operations who tortured dogs and fought them to the death.

So if you are the Tasty Baking Company making Tastykakes and the Eagles blind side you with this bad press snafu, what do you do?  Do you back the Eagles and hope that the king of dog fighters working in a city with a troubled history of dog fighting, might not rub off on your brand?  Do you hope against hope that your product does not become the emblem of a boycott like disco records burned at ball fields in the late 70’s & early 80’s?

Do you take action and get in front of the negative public reaction, remove your sponsorship from the Eagles and possibly win some good PR for being the first company to drop the Eagles and Michael Vick like the bad will magnet that he is? 

The AP broke a story indicating that all the Philadelphia sponsors are currently sticking with Michael Vick and the Eagles.  Most of those very large billion dollar a year generating companies can afford to hedge their bets a little bit, but Tastykake is based in the heart of Philadelphia, they even sponsored the Eagles’ blog.

But that sponsorship disappeared yesterday (not all sponsorships, just the mention on the blog).  Some Michael Vick protesters have sent us accounts of their discussions with Tastykake employees, who were extremely troubled by the Eagles hiring of Michael Vick.  They indeed felt blind sided, but their reaction seems to initially be coming out right at the same time that the larger press would have us believe that the world doesn’t care about Michael Vick, that fans don’t care what Michael Vick has done, and that sponsors are still willing to pay Michael Vick and his team money.

I don’t know where this is going yet, but I do know this.  We’ve been working on this effort for over 2 years here at Sackvick.net.  We are growing in scope and organization.  While Michael Vick was in prison many parts of our efforts were dormant, but the community has been rudely re-awakened by his rapid reinstatement back into the NFL with almost no review of his actions.  Michael Vick has literally done almost nothing to fix the problems he created with his 6 year dog fighting operation.  Yet the NFL and now the Eagles are very quick to give him a pass and try to make a buck. 

We have no quarrel with their financial goals, but as fans of the NFL we surely do not need to support an organization that so crudely slaps us in the face by hiring Michael Vick and that extends also to companies that would sponsor the Philadelphia Eagles so that they can pay Michael Vick $1.6 million this year and $5.2 million next year.  That’s just ludicrous.

As a small business owner myself, I hope that the Tasty Baking Company ultimately makes the right choice.  They are a company built on a 100 years of goodwill, it doesn’t make business sense for them to spend money on the Eagles only to shovel their goodwill into a whole to cover up the crimes that Michael Vick has committed.  Michael Vick is a goodwill money pit.  A lot of sponsors got burned to the tune of $130 – $250 million gambling on Michael Vick, and all he had to do was stay out of trouble.  He knew better, he had won the golden ticket, the lottery and much more, but even knowing that he couldn’t stop himself from killing and torturing dogs for fun. 

Throwing good money after a bad apple that makes decisions that poorly is crazy.