Schafer: Stadium naming rights deal gives CHS much-needed visibility

Even close followers of the Twin Cities business community might be a little bit fuzzy on what CHS actually does.

Makes ethanol? That's a good answer, although that's a pretty recent initiative. The cooperative's fuel distribution business is much bigger. It also crushes soybeans, sells fertilizer and a lot of other things, too.

And how many would know that CHS through the first nine months of its current fiscal year had revenue of roughly $33 billion?

CHS is the nation's largest farmer-owned cooperative, but it's not exactly a household name. Otherwise, it wouldn't have listed "what does CHS do?" at the top of a list of frequently asked questions on its website. CHS would like to change that, so it made a savvy play by putting its name on a little baseball stadium now under construction in St. Paul.

The deal with the minor league St. Paul Saints is a low-cost visibility strategy by CHS, whose headquarters is in nearby Inver Grove Heights. And, as the company is promoting, Saints baseball is "all about the fun."

One of the reasons CHS is under the radar probably has to do with its structure, as a cooperative owned by its members. But even that's less than the full story. Punch in the ticker CHSCP on Yahoo Finance and you'll see its preferred stock trading this week on Nasdaq.

CHS is more than twice as big as General Mills, but put the co-op's recruiting table next to the one from General Mills at the job fair at a big business school, and the line waiting to hear about CHS will be a lot shorter. That's a fixable problem.

Stadium naming can work very well to build awareness, Hopkins said, because "it can cut through the clutter."

That's why they are so popular, even for companies without a big consumer profile, like CHS. Plymouth-based Mosaic Co., for example, has its name on the home of the Saskatchewan Roughriders, a popular Canadian football team.

Corporate names on stadiums might seem like a recent phenomenon, but the tradition in baseball actually goes back 100 years or so, as Fenway Park in Boston was opened by the same family that happened to own the Fenway Realty Co.

CHS hasn't discussed terms of its deal with the St. Paul Saints, but it's almost impossible for the cost to be a consequential number for a company the size of CHS.

Major stadium names are priced, roughly, on the population of the local area. A major league venue only costs the owner of the Coors brand a little over $1 million per year in Denver, a media market roughly the size of the Twin Cities.

Did the Saints make the playoffs this year? Are there even playoffs in its league? Who cares? What the Saints are selling is an outing in the sunshine at a small venue with lots of fun things happening including a baseball game.

Saints spokesman Sean Aronson explained that more than 248,000 people attended this past season, an average of nearly 5,300 per game. The team guesses that its "uniques" this past season, a marketing term that means how many different people actually participated, was about 180,000.

It's not really a traditional sports audience, either. Its attendance heavily tilts toward women rather than men. The Saints customers tend to be 25 to 54 year old homeowners with kids, and more than 90 percent of them have some form of higher education degree.

Through surveys and other traditional tools, CHS knows it's really well-known in the rural areas the company serves, said Linda Tank, vice president of CHS enterprise marketing and communication.

"We're are actually a Fortune 100 company, and happen to be the world's largest co-op," she said. "We have pretty significant presence globally. … But you know, in the Twin Cities we are maybe not as well-known."

CHS executives were certainly aware of new stadium under construction in St. Paul, a 7,000 seat venue just a 12-minute drive or so from CHS headquarters.

So Tank picked up the phone and dialed an assistant general manager of the Saints, and as she put it, "After the first meeting, we kind of knew."

CHS is owned by its members, so before going ahead, CHS scheduled a Saints outing late this season at the old Midway Stadium in St. Paul for the 17 members of its board.

"We did get all 17 of them there," Tank said. "Of course, they are representing our farmer owners and cooperative owners. The weather was perfect, it was a great evening enjoying outdoor baseball. A number of them hadn't had an opportunity to experience Saints baseball, and they had a great experience."

Since the deal was announced, CHS has tried to connect its brand to America's past time, emphasizing shared ties to agrarian life and so on.