George Perry, a current business professor at George Mason, was a VP of marketing for the then-Redskins under owner Dan Snyder, bringing more than two decades of marketing experience with him.
His time with Washington, his childhood team, didn’t last long.
“It was a short, miserable time,” Perry told BMitch and Finlay on Tuesday. “I was there 2007 to 2009. I was there for about 14 months as the VP of strategic marketing.”
Like many have said about their time with the franchise, Perry said the culture under Snyder’s ownership was not one that created a desirable work environment.
“It was a very, very difficult culture to work in,” Perry said. “Especially after having been a longtime fan. Truthfully, I had many friends that warned me and said I shouldn’t work there for all the money in the world, and I said, ‘This is my team. How bad could it be? This is what I grew up with.’ But it was bad. Clearly, it was not a culture that really cared about the employees or cared about the fans. It cared about winning and paying the players a lot of money, but didn’t have a clear strategy of how to be successful.
“It was hard going into work every day, because it wasn’t a place you enjoyed being at.”
Perry recalled a time where the community was no longer paying for shuttle services to the stadium, to which Snyder ordered that the service be stopped unless a sponsor could be found to pay for it, making for a much more treacherous walk for fans on Sundays.
“The answer was, ‘Find somebody to sponsor that, and if you can’t we’ll go without shuttles,’” Perry said.
That is where Perry would start if he were the new Commanders owner: fan experience should be paramount, as it was sorely lacking during his time with the team.
“From a marketing side, I would say fan engagement and gameday experience,” Perry said. “We had an owner who wasn’t really out there in the community…it wasn’t like he was completely embracing the fans.”
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