After LeBron James made his decision to join the Miami Heat, the team marketing department becomes tasked with how to best market the team and their three All-Stars. They will need to come up with a catchy slogan that can be used as a centerpiece of their marketing campaign. May I suggest the phrases “ThreeHeat and or “Miami ThreeHeat”?
Clearly, these slogans are an excellent word play on the name of the team and the number of All-Star players that they’ve just signed. However, a closer examination of the phrase also shows that it has a very powerful and relevant historical antecedent.
Current Miami Heat president Pat Riley became famous as the coach for the Los Angeles Lakers during their championship runs in the 1980’s. After the Lakers won back to back championships in 1987 and 1988, Riley (in a action that showed incredible foresight and business acument) trademarked the term “Threepeat” as a term referring to a team winning 3 consecutive championships. The Lakers didn’t win their third straight championship but other teams subsequently did and once can assume Riley profited greatly from his actions.
One only needs to change one letter from “ThreePeat” to get “ThreeHeat”…I’m sure I’m not the only one who thought of this :.)
With any new idea / brainstorm I get, my first course of action is to check to see the availability of the relevant dot com/net/org domain names. Threeheat.com (though now showing as private) and Threeheat.net appear to be registered by somebody in the HVAC business. Clearly, this guy could end up inadvertently owning some very valuable online property. Variants of “MiamiThreeHeat” appear to be available though I think anyone buying any names with “Miami” and “Heat” in them and monetizing them with basketball content will likely run afoul of the trademark police. Variants of “ThreeHeat” should be safe (since the term is pretty generic) and if the team decides to do something with the phrase, the names purchased before the team action should not be subject to UDRP so long as any future trademark taken out by the team isn’t infringed upon.
BTW, all the obvious variants of “ThreeHeat” in .com, .net & .org appear to have been recently purchased :.)
