Quote ="Hangerman2"Sadly this is true. When Alex Murphy arrived we turned around the playing fortunes of the club very quickly, but those 20 dire years (70's and 80's) have left a much deeper impact with the fanbase. It seems that the missing generation of fans continues to haunt us today, whereas clubs like Hull KR and even Leigh take defeat and disappointment on the chin and come back the stronger our fanbase is as fickle as the winter sun. We have provided a winning team, (almost) silverware and top international players, and yet the people of Huddersfield simply will not turn up in the numbers we deserve.
I would love it to be different as i have watched and loved my team for some 25 years now, but the reality is the town doesn't want it, Mr Davey has thrown everything he can at it, and continues to give away season tickets at lower than market value for a good number of years in the hope of igniting the sport.. Maybe if we'd won at wembley.. but i don't think anything is good enough for the people of Huddersfield to support our great team.'"
Ken Davy really hasn’t thrown everything at it.
A large proportion of people in the town just don’t know the club even exists. If they do know it exists, they don’t know what it’s about. And if they do know what it’s about, it won’t be about attractive things.
And who can blame them? It’s nigh on impossible to find out stuff about the club. There’s little presence in the town, and what there is is old and out of date. There’s nothing in the “Giants” branding (such as it is) to connect the club to the town in any meaningful way.
The only significant marketing campaign I can recall was “The Giants Revolution” from about ten years back. As a concept, it had no connection with the club or the town but at least it was *something*. It was followed up with nothing at all really. Just the odd poster of Eorl Crabtree. Some of those Giants Revolution posters are still up - which tells you a lot about how much energy they’ve put into the problem over the years.
What do people in this town value? How does the club link into that? How do the club get people to participate actively, not just think of it as a cheap one off day out with the kids? How are the club planning to build a culture around this? Does the club have any concept of what being a supporter is about? Or could be about?
The actual identity of the club itself is weak, vague and not aligned with how proudly people in Huddersfield think about Huddersfield. There’s 154 proud years of history representing this town, and the club can’t even get its own founding date right on the bloody badge and barely has the word Huddersfield anywhere on its brand (look at the website).
Ask yourself - honestly - what words people who aren’t fans think of when you think of the brand “Huddersfield Giants”. I bet it would be stuff like “don’t know”, “losers”, “odd”, “nothing”, “weak”, “bottlers”, “confusing” and very, very short on words like “proud”, “community”, “representing the town”, “strong”, “exciting”, “confident”
So let’s not even start down the road of saying that KD has thrown everything at it. He’s sure thrown a lot of money at it, but most of that has been ed up a wall.
