Swing And A Miss
Just read a piece about baseball taking a dive. Supposedly nobody cares about America’s pastime anymore. We goddamn do. We sponsor the Elmwood Jets, one of the oldest teams in Holyoke Youth Baseball.
This MLB lockout doesn’t help. Attendance is down, TV viewership is off. Tickets cost $100, plus parking and tube steaks and some golden effervescence. That ain’t helping, Charlie Tuna.
The younger crowd wants action. Baseball is all about data. Mining the numbers and the pitch count. And that has led to slow-mo play and King Kong’d the game. The whole goddamn world has been taken over by data analysts and metrics. It squeezes the life out of everything.
In my business, it’s focus groups that always put the kaboomer on original ideas, steering everything toward the boring, predictable middle. Like Buck Norman says, “When you try to cater to everybody, you don’t connect with nobody.”
The hall-of-fame list of focus group failures is endless. If we listened to the naysayers, we’d never have had The Sopranos or Seinfeld. When FedEx founder Fred Smith was a student at Yale, he turned in an economics paper on how to improve how goods travel in the USA. They flunked him.
Here’s a real hounddog beauty. British Airways conducted focus groups on what people wanted to eat on flights. Hey, people want to make themselves look good, so they lied and said fruits and salads. Not understanding the consumer at all, that’s what the airline went with. But a veteran flight attendant said no way. She’d spent years waiting on passengers and knew what they really want—chocolates and cake. So British Airways gave them both a shot. At the end of flights, the chocolates and cakes were gone and the fruits and salads filled the fridges. You know what that veteran flight attendant had going for her? Well-informed gut instincts.
Keep your dukes up.