The “P.T. Barnum of Baseball” knows what fans hate, and they love him for it. Imagine packing the family up to watch your local minor league baseball team. You arrive at the stadium, present your tickets, and, viola, your evening is ready to rock. No worrying about cash for parking or waving that plastic around to pay for concessions. It is all included in your $20 ticket. Sound enticing to you? We’re just getting started.
Welcome to Grayson Stadium in Savannah, Georgia, where the Savannah Bananas have played before more than one million fans in the first-ever ad-free ballpark featured on ESPN, CNN, The Wall Street Journal, and USA Today. Where they have sold out every game since their first season in 2015 and have more than 12 thousand fans on the waiting list to watch the antics that include the Banana Nanas, their senior citizen dance team, breakdancing coaches, and the Dad Bod Cheerleading Squad. Where fan loyalty is so over the top the Bananas have 300,000 more TikTok followers than the closest Major League Baseball team.
What’s up with Jesse Cole and his Savannah Bananas? He’s smart as a whip and wise beyond his years when it comes to understanding what customers, no, fans want and don’t want. A former Wofford College baseball player who was good enough to be recruited by the Braves, Padres, and Mets before a shoulder injury ended his MLB aspirations, Jesse bought the Bananas and turned the team into a successful and entertaining team. And he did it not by surveying his fans or other traditional marketing methods, but by watching them, very closely, to see how they behaved—to see what they showed him.
“If Henry Ford asked people what they wanted, they would have requested faster horses,” Jesse explained, “In any industry, if you put yourself in your customer’s shoes and ask, ‘What are those friction points from when I first interact with you on your website to when I walk into your store, to when I buy from you,’ you can eliminate those friction points and start creating these raving fans.”
In the podcast episode, Jesse offers listeners nine full innings of useful ways your company can stand out by thinking differently, creating attention, and making fans for life.
You will learn:
- 5:00 How to use “Idea Paloozas” to grow good ideas from the seeds of bad ideas.
- 10:00 The “secret shopper” method Jesse uses to learn how fans really feel.
- 15:30 Why customer experience trumps sales and revenue metrics every day.
- 17:00 How to identify points of friction in your company. (Hint: NOT surveys!)
- 26:30 How to have more fun at work.
- 30:00 How to recharge through an “energy audit” of your calendar.
- 36:00 How to create a vision like Walt Disney.
Resources:
- Find out how to transform your business by creating fans for life.
- World tour tickets.
- Follow Savannah Bananas on TikTok and Instagram.
- Connect with Jesse on LinkedIn.
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Greg Brenneman
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Rick Hendrick
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