Lately I have been doing a lot of reading, thinking, and writing about the world of sports and live entertainment.
And, what is pretty interesting about that is that everywhere I look, the answer to the challenges that so many industries are dealing with seems obvious, but the way that they talk them also feel and seem obviously bad.
Take a look at the situation in many sports organizations right now here in the States, lots of empty seats, declining ratings on the TV, and less interest in sports across the board in participation and viewing.
That’s a bad sign.
So what’s the wise thing to do that it seems like every team and league is using as their version of the Hail Mary?
Here are a few:
- Raise prices, often a lot.
- Become more and more corporate in your thinking, acting, and environment.
- Treat your fans and customers like demographic groups.
I could probably list a few more, but that’s not the point.
If you look at any number of industries that are facing similar challenges, you’d see a similar pattern:
Let’s look at the Democratic Party:
- People don’t trust you and want a more people focused populist message and party, let’s hire someone that has no campaign, organizing, or strategy experience to run the party.
- People have a feeling that the primary for president was rigged to favor one candidate over the other, word leaks that this was true. Instead of admitting that, addressing it, and finding a way forward…how about telling everyone to get over it and move on.
- The party rolls out the idea that they will be cool because of “demographics” and what happens, they have lowered turnout in every demographic and the demographics that they were talking to were offended that they talked to them like blocks of data and not like people.
Again, on and on I can go.
You want to look at Microsoft’s challenge with LinkedIn?
Sure, final example:
- Offer up a paid service that people had been locked into for 12 months or so, change it up on them, boom! Then when people get angry, you send out the division CEO to whine on Twitter about the type of feedback you are getting? Then you wonder why people are using the platform less and less.
- Change the site’s UX from one that people had become used to and knew how to use for business reasons to one meant to appeal to a Facebook Lite crowd that likely wasn’t going to be heavy business users anyway!
- Make the platform worthless for large groups of users because of the amount of spam that is sent under the guise of “sponsored” posts.
Again, I could go on, but you get the point.
In each of these cases, the companies and organizations involved have probably looked at data, polled tested ideas, and focused group the crap out of things…but to what end?
I’d say to no good end.
Why?
Because you’ve not done anything to address the big issue, we need to get back to treating people like people.
Case in point, I was at Philz coffee in SE DC last week with my son. I told the barista that I wanted some whole bean coffee to take home. I explained my preferences and when they didn’t have something that was specifically designed that way, she made it up for me…on the spot.
That’s human.
Compare that to anytime you go out to eat or to a game when the person on the other end of the transaction takes your order, your money, and moves you through as fast as possible?
Which will you prefer?
And, I get it, someone is going to email me to tell me…fast is the key in some of these transactions.
But the thing about it is, it doesn’t really take any more time to be human than it does to be an automaton.
And, as our society is stressed more and more because of our constant need to be on, our constant feeling of being overwhelmed by noise and data, and on and on…
The companies that win aren’t going to be the ones that squeeze the last bit of life out of every interaction.
No!
If we want that, we can always just automate most of these things.
Instead, the businesses and places that are going to win are going to be the ones that are more human. That delight us and that make dealing with actual people worth our effort and worth our time.
Everyone else…good luck with that.