Big Ideas:
- Demographics is a bad way to segment a market.
- Strategy before tactics.
- Begin everything with diagnosis.
I’m including a lot of brand stuff this week for a few reasons:
- The brand is everything in marketing. It is more than the BS that gets shared by numpties on the internet.
- Your brand can drive revenue and profits for your business, among other positive impacts.
- I love brands and branding.
I have a strong affection for the Mets. I can’t tell you how many Mets games I’ve been to over the years. And, I can just go on about how much the Mets meant to me when I first moved to New York. I’d often ride the 7 out to Flushing with the Sunday papers, sit in the bleachers in centerfield, drink beer, and hang out.
What a time!
In reviewing my Brand Triangle, when we talk about meaning, the biggest thing that always sticks with me is that the Mets are the team of the City. The Yankees are NY, but they always felt like Jersey’s team to me.
That’s simplistic, but it always felt like there was so much more heat in the City when the Mets were good than when the Yankees were great.
Now we see a bunch of articles about the Mets’ focusing on updating their brand to attract a younger audience.
There are a few things to think about here:
First, demographics is a bad way to segment a market.
The foundation of any good brand management project is diagnosis. The foundation of diagnosis is research: qualitative and quantitative.
From there, you draw a picture of your market: segmentation.
There are a lot of ways to segment your market, but only one that really holds up to any analysis: behavioral segmentation.
In the case of what is being proposed by the Mets, the segmentation seems to be being driven by demographics which lets me point out the weakness here by highlighting a few theoretical situations:
- How different a 12-year-old boy and girl are.
- How different a 15-year-old girl in a rural area is from a city girl.
- How different a rich kid is versus a poor kid.
I can go on, but I hope you get the point.
Segment based on behavior and not on demographics.
Start with ethnography, go to small groups, and move to bigger groups.
That’s the basics of research.
Second, a 14% decline in TV viewership is a part of a trend of lower live sports viewership.
This has been going on for some time, but it isn’t really a reflection of the death of TV. While true that TV is declining, the numbers are slow and steady…not off a cliff. The last data I saw was around a 2-3% decline a year.
What is also true is that 80% or so of people downloaded, participated, or took part in some sort of video game content during the pandemic and a lot of that was driven by the desire to be a part of a community.
This means that there are some headwinds, but they aren’t insurmountable.
Finally, I’m concerned that this might end up being too tactical in nature and not strategic enough.
In Vegas, I heard my catchphrase: “strategy before tactics” a lot.
Thank you! Thank you!
Looking at this situation with my brand hat on, I should teach y’all about Brand Management 101.
When you start managing a brand, any brand, there is a three-step process to follow:
- Diagnose the problem.
- Build a strategy.
- Deliver the strategy using your tactics.
Rinse and repeat.
Two things are true from the brand projects I’ve worked on over the years:
- Most brands and brand managers are living in a constant state of chaos because marketing has been devalued in their organization and across the board in too many places.
- This is happening because too many brands and brand managers are overwhelmingly spending their time on the commodification of their brands through an overemphasis on tactics.
The plan I’ve laid out for brand management is the tried and true way that brands are managed going back to the birth of brand management in Cincinnati, Ohio on May 13th, 1931 with the McElroy Memo.
I could go on about this stuff all day long, but I’ll tighten this one up so I can return to it again in the months ahead.
First, any competent brand manager knows that the first step in a proper branding effort is diagnosis.
Step back, look at the market for what it is and not what you want it to be.
That’s why it is dangerous to promote actions to be taken, ideas that are being explored, or possible ways to execute the plan. These things create a bias. And, the bias is towards not doing the work properly because you’ll jump right into tactics and the continued commodification of your brand.
Diagnose first.
Second, segment based on behavior.
I shared the meaningful/actionable grid exercise with a couple of people I know and they admitted that after seeing the items that go into a proper segmentation, they’ll never go back to segmentation by demographics or other easy to create but often useless forms of segmentation.
Why?
Because behavior is what matters.
If you are a venue, a team, a band, or any organization, you need folks to take specific actions.
I’ve used the Prince Charles and Ozzy Osbourne example before, but let me use another ridiculous one here that better illustrates my point.
Think about this, by most generational, age-based demographic segmentation: Pete Davidson and Prince George are the same generations because their age is only separated by 18 years.
That’s ridiculous.
Focus on actions. What people do, not what they say, or how old they are.
Finally, strategy before tactics.
Again, a tired refrain, but I know that people often need to hear a message more times than a marketer has patience for delivering it before it seeps in.
In any proper brand work, you diagnose the challenge.
What worked and what didn’t?
What is the issue now?
What does the market look like?
Then you build a strategy around this.
Take action after that.
Review your results.
Adjust.
Begin again!
It isn’t quite that simple, but it also isn’t nearly as complicated as folks like to make it. Follow the process. Do the work.
As for the Mets, I hope the rebranding efforts are successful. Y’all know that they are my favorite baseball team.