Pittsburgh's Super Advice to Phoenix

Pittsburgh Steelers: Five Super Bowl rings, six trips to the big game.

Arizona Cardinals: None of the above.

The Steelers can rightly consider themselves veterans of the Super Bowl; almost all their fans can remember their last win a mere three years ago. So Pittsburgh-area businesses are savvy about how to gain from the team's success.

Arizona businesses have some work to do, since the Steelers' fan base has greater depth than the Cardinals'. A December study by New Jersey-based Turnkey Sports and Entertainment assessed the strength of professsional sports brands among hometown fans.

The Steelers, which placed first on the 2007 version of the study, were still in excellent standing on the 2008 list, coming in third. The Cardinals, however, don't have nearly that kind of popularity ­-- or didn't when Turnkey did its poll-- ranking No. 120 out of 122 teams across pro sports.

In the spirit of camaraderie, the Pittsburgh Business Times asked Pittsburgh-area businesses to give ideas from their Super Bowl play books to their Arizona counterparts.

Albert Elovitz, owner of Albert's Gifts in the city's Strip District, said Pittsburgh fans "will buy anything" when the team is on a run to the Super Bowl. "I doubt Arizona fans will be ready to buy on the same scale, so they want to start out small," Elovitz said. "No one wants to carry extra stock, so you have to be conservative."

Elovitz, who stocks an array of Steelers' merchandise, advises Arizona merchants not to get items with the year or date printed on them, so anything left over can be stocked the next year. And be careful not to fixate too much on one player, he said: if Cardinals' quarterback Kurt Warner gets injured, or retires after the game, for instance, it might be hard to sell his jerseys next season.

"For a while anything with Big Ben on it, or with No. 7, was flying off the shelves," Elovitz said. "Now the hottest things are Hines Ward and Polamalu. You never know."

by BizJournals.com

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