When the San Antonio Spurs announced Cullen/Frost Bankers ($CFR) as its first-ever jersey partner last year, you'd expect that more people worldwide would see the logo and want to find out more about them. Apparently not, as our data shows.
While there was an initial increase in interest in Frost Bank when the NBA season started when fans first saw the new logo on Spurs jerseys, interest trailed off at an alarming rate that would make any marketing executive think twice about future sponsorships.
The FrostBank sponsorship announcement took palce in August 2018, and you can see a small bump then and in October at opening tipoff. Unfortunately, the Twitter followers for Frost Bank have been down 3% since 2017, and it looks like people keep slowly weening off the brand online.
The same story goes for Facebook likes. The small bumps in August and October, for the same reasons, and the same overall loss in interest for the Texas banking brand. Hopefully, people don't associate the bad play of the Spurs with the customer service of Frost.
Frost Bank was a pretty lively part of Facebook, as the Talking About count was jumping in 2016. Again, there was a bump in the same months as mentioned above, and after that, just not a lot of discussion about Frost Bank at all.
Not to add insult to injury, but the stock price has fared better. Frost is one of many corporations we cover that seemingly wants to just keep growing and show investors endless expansion, and the employee count has increased 37% since we started tracking the data years ago.
Banks aren't usually the beacon of social media buzz that, say, popular tech companies are. So maybe people losing interest online and unfollowing the Frost account won't actually affect the in-store experience. As long as people like their bank, that should be enough. Maybe not enough to post about it like they used to, but we wonder what would happen if Frost stops sponsoring the Spurs.
Interestingly enough though, we saw a social media boost for Flagstar Bank, although that wasn't tied to their sponsorship of the Detroit Pistons, but instead buying a town's Christmas tree for the first time in a decade.
About the Data:
Thinknum tracks companies using the information they post online - jobs, social and web traffic, product sales and app ratings - and creates data sets that measure factors like hiring, revenue and foot traffic. Data sets may not be fully comprehensive (they only account for what is available on the web), but they can be used to gauge performance factors like staffing and sales.