Happens way more than you'd expect. They are both companies that rely heavily on red for branding. It's easy to confuse the two. I remember Olivia Chow being late to a meeting once because she went to the wrong place, after being told it was at the Rogers Centre.
I just doubt that's the case. One anecdote about Olivia Chow is not very convincing. We'll have to agree to disagree. To the extent anyone is confused (a small number I presume), it would have more to do with the fact that the two buildings are the two main sports facilities in Toronto, both located downtown close to one another south of Front Street, not because they both have the word "Centre" in their otherwise dissimilar names. Otherwise, we should consider renaming City Hall and/or St. Lawrence Hall, because presumably the use of the word "hall" in both causes confusion and Olivia might go to the wrong place again.
Just looking at Twitter metrics for one comparison, Rogers Centre has been used 216 times since August 24th vs. Skydome which has been used 682 times. Clearly Skydome is still the preferred name. That's 3 times as many people calling it by its old name than the new name, and those tweets have had nearly 3 million impressions vs. under 800,000 impressions for Rogers Centre.
Twitter? With the 140-character limit, people will naturally prefer the 7-letter SkyDome to the 13-character Rogers Centre. That's proof that SkyDome has almost half as many characters as Rogers Centre, not that "SkyDome is still the preferred name". To see media usage, try Google News, where SkyDome + Toronto (I added "Toronto" to the search because the National Corvette Museum in Bowling Green has a facility called Skydome that is reopening this week) got less than one tenth of the hits as "Rogers Centre" + Toronto (4340 vs. 39,100). In other words, people are reading, hearing and seeing the Rogers name all the time in the media, which is what Rogers wants. Even a regular web search with Google has Rogers Centre on top (659,000 to 415,000). When you add "Blue Jays" to the mix instead of Toronto, it's 514,000 to 160,000. I hate that Rogers has succeeded with the rename, but as I said before they've succeeded in getting most people to say and write the name Rogers, regardless of whether people like you or I continue to call it SkyDome.
Scotiabank Saddledome has been mentioned 200 times on twitter during the same time period, whereas Saddledome on its own (removing all tweets with Scotiabank included) has only been mentioned 123 times.
I notice the references to "Scotiabank Saddledome" are almost entirely ticket resellers, whose tweets may very well be bots, versus the references to Saddledome on its own appear to be tweets from the rest of the world.
Keeping SkyDome in the name, or even simply dome would have likely lead to way more people using their handle than the old name.
There is no evidence of that. Naming rights for large sports facilities in big cities go for millions of dollars. When big money is involved, names are not chosen on a whim, but only after study and examination of precedents. If keeping old names versus soulless "centre" and "place" monikers clearly worked as well, the marketing people would choose the old names. They don't.
Even the media refers to it as 'the dome' quite often.
A noted above, not that often. Again, Rogers won that bet because their name is in the media way more. That's why it's called Rogers Centre, as much as it galls me.
I guarantee "The Rogers Dome" or "Rogers Skydome" would have given them way more exposure than the current name, and judging by Scotiabank's success with Saddledome, I wouldn't be surprised if Rogers ended up with more exposure too had they kept the original name.
Again, there is no evidence of any of that. The only evidence is that Rogers owns the stadium, renamed it after itself, and people now use the Rogers name all the time to refer to it. Rogers wins. The rest of us lose.
Not that I wouldn't love it if the place were renamed "Rogers SkyDome" (Rogers Dome isn't much better than Rogers Centre). But I'm not going to deny that Rogers made a safe and successful choice in renaming it Rogers Centre, on the basis of their narrow self-interest. And I think we do both agree that that sucks.
