"Now when you step outside, you can enjoy fresh Nestlé air blowing through free standing Burt's Bees sycamore trees at 1Password Park. Bring your whole nuclear family!".
You can do good in your community without being gaudy.
The way they’ve done it is very black mirror vibes.
Then there's the complaint that corporations will do things like spend X dollars on a park to show what great guys they are, and then engage in tax-dodging like registering their trademark to a foreign entity and coincidentally every year the "royalties" on the trademark just magically work out so the domestic company doesn't make any money...and they end up avoiding Y taxes, where Y is probably several orders of magnitude greater than X.
And then there's all the tax breaks companies get when they make noise about thinking of moving somewhere else.
I don't know if 1password does any of this, primarily because I can't find the slightest bit of tax information about 1password (or "Agilebits", the actual corporate name.)
Can't you just have a sign there that mentions the generous donation? Maybe even a big sign? Multiple signs? Naming the park might even backfire and do the opposite of fostering goodwill. It’s dystopian.
I would doubt anyone in that city isn't aware of the one big success in tech they have going right now and are probably happy to see them actually giving back to help out the folks who live there (which likely include the founders and employees). It's not like they are buying the naming rights to an arena in downtown Miami, it's a small park on the outskirts of their hometown.
I live an hour away in Kitchener-Waterloo, we have RIM park and there has been a culture around these parts of companies putting money back into the community, sponsoring events and helping develop areas and I would view this more in that realm than anything shady. I've been all over South Western Ontario and I still haven't made it to St. Thomas because it's out of the way (even when visiting nearbyish London) and there is like nothing there, so I don't see this as something dirty or they would have spent their money on somewhere that it would make any marketing impact at all.
Good on them for trying to help out their own community.
I haven't understood why this isn't used more often. If there's a station next to a corporate HQ or mall, let the company/mall pay for naming rights. They get publicity, the transit system gets money, it's a win-win.
Not a single person will sign up for 1Password because of this park, and they know that. It's not marketing.
Someone with decision making power at 1Password loves this park (or this area) and is using the money they've collected via 1Password to keep it alive and going.
This is wonderful and I love it. It reminds me of how my (venture backed tech) company sponsors the Barnesville Potato Days every year in Minnesota. Not because we think we'll get a sign up, but because one of our employees loved it and talked about it all the time and when they needed money one year we were happy to part with it.
EDIT: Yup, they have an office near there and the founder is from the area: https://dteare.medium.com/14-years-of-growth-the-1password-s...
I'm not saying they made it for marketing purposes, but that seems very naive to me. How is this any different than any other type of marketing supposed to increase name-id?
If you want to save a park, save it without putting your name on it...
I don't have an opinion about this particular park but usually what people ask for is to tax corporations and use the funds for public good. This means that the public gets to decide how the funds are used rather than the corporation.
Though my preferred economic arrangement is an economy comprised primarily of cooperatives, and perhaps some federation of cooperatives to decide on allocation of funds for public good.
That's exactly how name-id advertising works.