I’m heartened to hear that Major League Baseball is taking its demographic challenges seriously, finally.
My concern is will the efforts be too little too late.
Because at the core of MLB’s challenge is the fact that they have allowed a generation or more of fans whittle away the prime ages that they would hook them following and falling in love with other sports.
My 6 year old son wakes up every morning to watch “Good Morning Football” before he goes to school. He is a rabid Washington Capitals fan. His favorite college football player is Jalen Hurts and he can name every player on the Alabama football team. He talks constantly about Steph Curry, Kevin Durant, and LeBron James.
But when the topic of baseball came up during our walk last night, he seemed indifferent to the game.
I asked if he wanted to go to a Nationals game or an Orioles game this year.
He shrugged and said, “he wanted to go to the Mets’ game” but only because his aunt and uncle live in NYC and they gave him a Mets’ shirt. He couldn’t tell me anything about it.
Which is the challenge the sport faces in general. When I talk with my son’s friends, they don’t ever mention baseball.
They mention soccer and Messi.
They talk basketball and KD.
The love Ovi and hockey.
They don’t really have much attachment to baseball.
Which again raises an issue that I have talked about and written about in a number of different areas, the need to do hardcore fan development over many years; to think about the lifetime value of your fans; and to use stories as a tool to build the game and tie the history to the present.
In looking at MLB’s current situation, their average fan’s age has risen one year every year. That’s a bad sign for the sport because you need the numbers to be stable or declining to indicate that interest of your sport hasn’t become marginalized.
Right now, we see MLB’s leadership doing some soul searching and some of the changes they are proposing or offering feel a little like throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Or, like they have been conceived by a committee of the same people that offer up stupid buzz words like FOMO, engagement, and other useless measures and marketing terms.
Sure, fans that are watching at home aren’t paying as much attention to the games and aren’t as engaged with the game being played. Join the club. That’s a challenge for anything being shown on TV. With people that have 2nd or 3rd screens going, distraction is the new norm.
What isn’t a wise decision is to make decisions based on placating the TV audiences that no matter what you are doing are still going to be distracted and likely to still flip between channels no matter what is happening in your game.
The same thing goes for many of the ideas being offered up as ways to improve the game and improve attention and lifetime fan development.
Partnerships: okay…those are great! They bring in lots of money. But are you going to use the partnership in a way that actually teaches the game to people and helps them be a part of the history? Or, is it just another corporate marketing trick that draws people in and distracts from the product on the field?
Streaming is awesome and despite what Lee Berke seems to think, consumers aren’t adapting slowly to watching and consuming video on their mobile devices, they are adapting more rapidly than our content producers can keep up.
When that comes to sports, it is even more problematic because of the nature of many of the rights deals, the demands of fans can’t be met by the leagues and teams because of the restrictive nature of some of these rights deals and the desires of the TV networks to protect their assets at the risk of losing long term fans and long term allegiance because of the short term protection of the assets.
Speed up the game by changing the intentional walk…that’s probably something that is going to end up being basically meaningless on the time side.
Put a runner on second at the start of extra innings. That’s a pretty terrible idea.
What a lot of these ideas and a lot of the thinking behind these ideas shows is a lack of understanding about the core issues and how to solve them.
And, a lot of these core challenges are endemic to sports in general and are being masked by the billions of dollars in TV money that has flooded into the sports world over the last few years.
But let’s flip this on its side and look at the challenges and opportunities for MLB as they face down some pretty terrible demographic challenges.
Age is a factor:
MLB fans are getting older and older. Fact.
To me this lines up a few issues.
First, the same factors that made baseball America’s pastime aren’t present any longer and haven’t been for a generation or two.
As a lifelong baseball fan, I can remember the thrill of being able to go to Lockhart Stadium in Ft Lauderdale to see the Yankees Spring Training games, being able to ride my bike over from Northeast High School to sneak in to see the last inning or two of a meaningless March game.
There was a thrill to seeing Hank Aaron up close, sitting in a seat, signing autographs for fans as he kept an eye on the Braves.
Or, getting Cal Ripken’s autograph. He was a great player to the fans.
I can still describe the feeling I got when I would get to the games. I remember standing in line to get tickets to the first Marlins’ game. I remember buying tickets to the World Series and losing my mind when the Marlins won the World Series.
All of these are stories and each of them is like a thread, wrapping me closer and closer to the game.
This same feeling and affinity doesn’t really exist with many kids my son’s age or even older. Sure, I know some kids that are still into baseball, but when I attend a game, the amount of kids present isn’t the same as even ten years ago.
Which leads us to the fact that stories and statistics have always been the best way to build and connect the game.
At the heart of the baseball experience has been the mythical games of catch between father and son. There has been the tales of your parents favorite players and how the revered them. There was the anticipation of seeing the inside of the stadium with your own eyes.
These stories, these connections, this anticipation, created a compelling narrative and a feeling of awe around the game which has been lost in the rush by Bud Selig to guarantee every team a new stadium and to raise revenues at all costs.
As the teams have become more valuable, this has driven teams to become more conservative in their marketing, advertising, and the ways that they operate.
Leading most advertising, partnerships, and marketing to not be so much safe as to be more or less sterile and generic.
No story. No connection. No anticipation.
The flip side of this is that as the Cubs and Indians World Series showed, baseball can still captivate and still tickle our imagination.
To me it doesn’t seem like a coincidence that the 2016 World Series had such heat. The stories about the two franchises were compelling. The games had drama. I mean, the World Series was everything that is right about sports.
The key to overcoming the age challenge begins by telling stories again.
I’m famously in the every team doesn’t need to have a history like the Yankees or the Cubs, but every team has their folklore and their fan favorites. Every team has a history and that history gives fans, new and old, a point on the continuum.
Use your history and your folklore to help tell stories to your fanbase.
Use stories to get fans to learn and embrace the game.
Use stories to help turn kids back onto the game.
The imagery of a kid using a tennis ball and a broom stick to play stick ball in the streets. The way whiffle ball players turn into Major Leaguers. The list of ways that you can use stories to increase awareness and affinity for the game is limitless.
But until you start getting fans back into the idea of baseball, the age numbers are going to continue to get uglier and uglier.
What’s In An Experience?
In a few weeks I will be off to the UK to deliver a keynote on the future of live entertainment and my hypothesis is that the core of building the next generation of live entertainment fans is going to be built on a foundation of 3 concepts:
- stories
- communities
- experience
The big thing being pulling everything together so that your guests experience magical, transformative experiences.
I’ve been fortunate to have been to most of the ballparks around the country.
Some are fantastic and beautiful. Some are a little older. Some have more nooks and crannies. Some have more history.
What is powerful about going to the game is that you can be transported in a way that you don’t get when you are watching on TV.
I think you can win over people with the TV experience, but you steal their hearts and a lifetime of devotion when you get them into your stadium.
That’s why when people come to your ballpark, you have to create something magical and something unique.
I recently went to Wrigley Field and took a big chunk of my family. I know that Wrigley doesn’t have many of the amenities that it is believed every stadium needs to have, but the place was packed and people were really into the game.
And, I know that Wrigley is its own special situation, but the key is that we can all do a better job of maximizing the experience of attending a game.
Its pretty easy to think that experience is all in the amenities, the length of lines, and locations of team stores.
That’s untrue.
The experience is in everything that happens.
So when you are designing your in-game experience, knowing you want to attract and keep customers, how can you make the experience of coming to the ballpark more human?
Can you hire friendlier staff for the gates, seats, and concessions?
Can you build a community around the different foods, drinks, and concessions?
Is it possible to offer up more humanity in your experience?
Is it impossible to wow your fans, especially the kids and new fans so that they are excited to go to the game. So that they rave about their experience of going to your game.
Because trust me, winning the kids early begins with being human and creating an experience that they want to talk about…because if you ask my kid about hockey, he is going to tell you a list of stories about his experience going to his first Caps’ game and he will go on and on and on.
Even when these things cost money, the ROI is tremendous.
Make MLB A Lifestyle Brand
The embracing of digital tools and technologies is pretty neat because MLB was one of the leaders in sports in the push to embrace digital.
What this means is that they have it in their DNA to push digital and make it work from a brand building and revenue generating perspective.
I’ve been writing and thinking about lifestyle branding a lot lately with some of my favorites being Peninsula Hotels, Stone Brewing, and La Colombe coffee. I think that sports has a great opportunity to create the same sort of lifestyle branding around their teams and I think that baseball can and should lead the way.
Baseball could be the ultimate lifestyle brand by embracing 3 key branding concepts.
The first, as I wrote above, is story telling.
The second, is by embracing and creating communities around their teams.
I thought the story of the Royals fan from South Korea coming to his first game in 2015 was a fantastic example of all that can be accomplished by using your team as the core of a community and a community that sees itself in a certain way.
I think we miss a big opportunity if we don’t create real communities around our teams and our experiences.
I like to think that being a Raiders’ fan feels different than being a fan of the Eagles. And, I like to think that those two fan bases would tell you exactly that.
What is the MLB equivalent?
Cubs fans have a definite identity.
Yankees fans used to.
Red Sox fans still have the edge and personality that defines a community.
Why do I harp on this community idea?
Well, communities are built on connections and emotions. Stories help turn emotions into action. And, without this combination, you get apathy and instead of a community you have a commodity.
The final attribute of a lifestyle brand that MLB should embrace is the need for self expression as a core of modern lifestyle brands and enable it.
One of the better partnership activations that MLB has been a part of in recent memory is the Coca-Cola personalized bottle activation at its stadiums. I would say it was a little too successful if you were trying to hook fans on the game, but you can’t win them all.
But what this highlights is that people like to have a bit of themselves in the brand. The choices consumers make tells a story about them and the modern consumer is willing to make that connection explicit.
To capture this desire, it is important that MLB take this desire for a personalized brand experience and a personalized experience with the brand and enable fans to have some fun with the game. With all of the new social platforms, VR technologies, and other enhancements, experiential tools can be used that can add to the connection to the brand and give people more incentive to embrace MLB.
What say you about turning around MLB’s demographics?