John U. Bacon article on decreasing student attendance and game experience at Mich. Stadium
Thought this was a pretty interesting read, makes some vaild points on why students are frustrated and not showing up and why the game day experience should be more for what the fan pays. What are your thoughts?
(IIRC, yearly) to the athletic department employee who most embodies that quote. Not a joke. IOW, more than just saying it, he says it's one of his guiding mantras.
If David Brandon really, truly believes and practices "If it ain't broke...break it!" then he doesn't give a rat's bleeding ass about tradition.
Every time the word "tradition" comes out of his pie hole, what he really means is "I love tradition unless I want to destroy it, which is frequently."
Gotta love the power of mGoBlog.
When I was a kid, people would laugh when I said I wanted to go to a game. Good luck kid, there's a waiting list miles long.
Now I just need to figure out when I can make the trip up.
Bacon didn't use that exact phrase, but it's pretty clear that's what he meant. I work with about 30 very large, multi-national corporations. The most successful base their entire business model (including internal and supply chain operations) on delivering what customers most want and value, understanding that there may well be variation, but nevertheless a clearly definable set of groups. From there, every goal and objective, process, policy, metric, organizational design, talent, skill and decision is focused on delivering to those customer-defined requirements. It's called "outside-in" thinking.
What Brandon has done is exactly the opposite: "inside-out". He's started with what he thinks the product should be and is now trying to get the "customer" to buy. It's a terribly unsuccessful model in the long run and a recipe for disaster. Good marketing people know this, which is why I think, in all actuality, he is a terrible marketing executive and a worse CEO. The Dominos Pizza turnaround is looking more like a blind squirrel finding a nut than the product of real consumer insights.
Customers vote with their feet, Dave, when you ask them for their opinions and needs but filter their answers through your own vanity.
I dont think in four years on the blog I've ever written "this" but the above post by Nija is so good, so accurate and so completely on the mark I'm going to break that streak.
Nija is absolutely correct on all counts. I've spent a lifetime in marketing for several large companies and what he describes is 100% correct - both in the way companies view customers and the substandard methods in which Brandon is marketing Michigan football (his current product from his perspective).
FWIW I worked with a "Brandon-like" CEO for several years whe was just sure of two things:
1. He could convince the customers to buy anything (afterall they are stupid you know)
2. He was not only the smartest guy in the room - he was the smartest guy in every room and any dissenting opinion was quickly squashed.
I dont know what working with Brandon is like but my guess is he's like that given the number of smart people the Michigan Athletic Depatment employ's and the number of mind-numbingly stupid decisions they seem determined to make.
I know UM employees who have been in meetings with DB and the "smartest guy in the room" mentality appears to be an accurate description.
I was against his appointment as AD precisely because he promised to bring a "CEO" approach to the position, especially since in his case his corporate experience was with companies that made their dough in junk mail and cheap pizza.
I agree that DB is sometimes unfairly blamed for things or for decisions that aren't that horrible, but there are far too many that have been foreseeably dumb (GA seating, seatcushiongate, not taking the band to Dallas) and/or obviously motivated by a desire to squeeze every conceivable nickel out of the fans.
That arrogance was refreshing and needed to deal with stretchgate, and comes in handy for dealing with the press. It's infuriating when he acts in that condescending manner towards the fans.
One end of the world where the "inside out" model works is the regulated end of the world, where I make my living. My employer generates and distributes electricity and buys and distributes natural gas to millions of people in the state of Michigan. The only thing is that these products simply are what they are and are consumed relatively quickly (nearly instantaneously, in the case of electricity). Further, at least for electricity, we're the only company you can go to in 13 counties in the state of Michigan. I am sure Dave Brandon wishes he had this sort of audience, but even then, we have to market ourselves to larger customers and we do get service agreements from people who might otherwise go choice.
As for the quote above, this is the one that made me think he may have forgotten which coach he played for:
“You’re a 17-18 year old kid watching the largest crowd in the history of college football with airplanes flying over and Beyonce introducing your halftime show? That’s a pretty powerful message about what Michigan is all about, and that’s our job to send that message.”
I don't remember any of that remotely resembling Michigan and what it was about, even when I was there in the mid to late 1990s. Like Bacon said, the world Brandon is creating at Michigan Stadium is the one I would go to Michigan Stadium to escape for a few hours.
If I wanted piped-in music and celebrity half time shows and all that kind of stuff, wouldn't I just go to a NFL game where you can't schedule a home schedule full of garbage? NFL season ticket holders complain about having to pay for preseason games. This year's schedule is barely better than NFL preseason games, and they have spent the last several years steadily decreasing what we liked about going to games and making it more like the pro experience.
I work exclusively for companies that manufacture products, some of them very large, complex industrial machines; others are cars, still others aircraft or their components. In every case, the segmentation and outside-in discussion of how customers define value; how best to deliver that value; and how to do so profitably are what define the companies that are able to consistently deliver higher financial and corporate performance, customer retention and brand recognition.
Henry Ford's comment is often quoted but completely misunderstood. I could make the same statement about Steve Jobs and the development of the iPad/iPhone/iPod, etc. Both are, in fact, ideal examples of "outside-in" thinking.
Ford and Jobs synthesized insights about "what customers really want" by distilling their hidden needs, wants and desires from observations about their behaviors, lives, etc. In Ford's case, he created a product for working men and women because he had been one himself. In fact, the design of his automobiles accounted for terrible roads because he knew that's where his customers lived. In Job's case, he saw that individuals were ripping music tracks from CDs and creating their own mixed discs but were doing so in violation of copyright laws. That led to the insight that a program like iTunes would address how people wanted to consume music and include the labels and content creators in the process. iTunes then begat the need for the iPod, etc.
If creating a product or service the customer wants is necessarily outside-in thinking then almost any successful busienss could be said to operate that way (excluding utilities and the like).
Regardless, Apple still doesn't work that way. As both Steve Jobs and Jony Ive have said on numerous occasions they design the products they want, with the expectation being others will want them too. However you stretch the definition I don't think you can call that outside-in thinking.
Also, your timeline is wrong. The iPod predated the iTunes Store by something like a year and a half, and before that record lables and content creators were not involved with iTunes. It was actually the iPod that begat the store.
All of the peer-reviewed, curated research says otherwise. Most recently, my company's 2013 benchmarking survey of 70 of the world's largest supply chains clearly demonstrated that companies following an outside-in business model have the following results versus companies with an "inside-out" model:
→ 15% Improvement in Inventory Levels
→ 30% Improvement in Cash-to-Cash Cycle Times
→ 17% Improvement in Perfect Order/Customer Service (including 28% improvement in On-Time Delivery)
→ 12% Improvement in Working Capital
→ 15% Improvement in Forecast Accuracy
→ 20% Improvement in New Product Launch Commercialization
→15% reduction in direct materials costs
→30-50% improvement in engineering cycle times
→ 6% Improvement in Gross Profit
My major point is that the largest company in the world (by market cap) explicitly follows inside-out thinking, and that's obviously worked very well for them. Are you stating that I am wrong, and Apple is not an example of inside-out thinking? And if so, can you point to a company product or services company that actually does use inside-out thinking?
Can't even see the article...did Dave Brandon get someone to shut down Bacon's server?
I think MGOBLOG crashed his site! sorry john.. haha... or was the article too real for Brandon?
Edit: Right when I post this comment the story is back on John's website.
you didn't renew after a 12-2 season, a BCS win and a brand new Head coach, because you could foresee the future ? Can you please reference your MGoBlog post as verification of your prodigous prognostification talents ?
Can you also please let us all know when the next stock market correction will occur !
Go Blue!
Michigan isn't the only one who is having this type of problem. Bama have a big problem with retaining students and they're way better than Michigan as a program. Not about wins. Students do truly feel like they need wifi which is their #1 priority when they're at the game so they can be on social media.
Which is why when CSG surveyed students last year about how to improve attendance, wifi placed last. Wifi will not solve this problem by itself, and I'm not sure how much it will actually help to be honest.
And yet, wasn't there an article last year about low student attendance at Alabama, also?
http://www.tuscaloosanews.com/article/20130919/NEWS/130919643
That is a much different problem than Michigan is having. At least Alabama's students are buying the tickets. No WiFi may be the reason that they buy tickets and don't go to the games, but it isn't the reason Michigan students/fans aren't buying the tickets in the first place.
DB is trying to fix the wrong problem; we haven't had that problem in a few years.
Angelique Chengelis writes on student attendace today, focusing largely on Michigan and MSU: LINK.
Her's is a good and balanced read, while Bacon's is a mystery because you selfish bastards have overloaded his website and I can't get access to the article.
[Edit - I powered through, and the Bacon article is one of the best things he's written in years. Anything I disagree with in that article is a trifling matter, and it's well worth your time to read. I still think you're selfish bastards, though.]
Bacon writes. I especially agree with this article wholeheartedly. The whole of college football is dangerously close to becoming something I just don't like very much anymore. It is Michigan's job to modernize without bastardizing. Not to suck out every nickle from every fan while putting on a "mini Superbowl" 7 times a year. Who has the energy or money for that crap?
This is the death of Michigan Exceptionalism. Any lingering feelings that Michigan was special or different from other colleges in regards to athletics has died under this AD. Despite his history and closeness to the program, Dave Brandon still sees his alma mater as a brand and runs it like a national pizza chain.
Not everything Dave Brandon has done has been bad and he most certainly receives a lot of criticism for fairly innocuous things, but he has fundametally changed the relationship between the AD and the students/fans for the worse.
Furthermore, Brandon and the B1G are some of the fiercest defenders of the "collegiate model" and "amateurism" which is infuriating due to their constant attempts to monetize and brand the shit out of everything. If you want to hide behind "the collegiate model", don't try to run your athletic department like you're the Dallas Cowboys.
On top of all the valid points in other posts. After years of sitting in the same section, row, seats , the "program" just up and decided to move me. Really? Yes, this screams we are not even customers but pawns.
Despite it all I still bleed blue and will support during the lows and highs. The support the team not the adminstrators of the business.
Not surprisingly, Angelique writes a similar article, but basically recites the U's position.
Sadly, Brandon has also created an environment with the media where those who rely on daily access for their job are turned into shills for U. Good for him, bad for the fans/alums.
http://www.detroitnews.com/article/20140606/SPORTS0201/306060041/Amid-f…
Uh, great minds think alike?
The headline of her article is insulting to the students IMO.
"Amid fickle students, comforts of home, schools scramble to unload football tickets"
Today's students are no more "fickle" than they were back in 1981 when I was a student. They are fans who are fed up with being shat upon by an Athletic Department who treats them as an unpleasant nusance and makes their gameday experience exponentially more unpleasant than the one I enjoyed centuries ago.
When I was in school tickets were cheap, we could sell them to anybody who wanted tot buy them and not just other students, we could bring in ANYTHING that wasnt in a bottle (including kegs BTW), could sit where we wanted for the most part (meaning with friends) and get into the stadium just like the everybody else. I feel pretty safe in saying that if I forced back in the day to go through the bullshit we put today's students through I'd probably have taken the same route many of them have and told the Athletic Department to shove it and found something else to do on Saturday afternoons in the fall.
Thanks for the nice compliments. They are very much appreciated.
I completely agree ... I'm a bit younger than you are, going to my first game as a student in 1986. However, while bringing in our own containers was by then prohibited, we weren't accosted by the event staff looking for alcohol. Games were easily affordable and it was the shared experience with friends that made for real, lasting memories. I can still remember as much about the high-fives after a come-back victory as I do about the winning touchdowns. I remember the moments, the band, the cheering. I also recall feeling like a part of a shared tradition that stretched back farther than my parents and grandparents.
Nija, you hit on something. Games always seemed like events that were "ours". Traditions, high-fives, tailgating... all "ours". Now it seems like many/most game-day things are "theirs", and they will allow us to still participate in, if we donate enough or pay enough.
Someone else said it better, when they summed it up as bottling up everything we love about Michigan, and selling it back to us.
Yes, to Njia's comments. "Shared Tradition" is a very brief phrase that encapsulates much of this discussion. When I went to games, I had a sense of sharing something with alumni and thousands of others stretching back for generations. This is increasingly being lost. Admittedly, traditions change, times change, things change. But we still long for a sense of shared community, shared values, and for being part of something bigger.
I took my boy to a White Sox game last month. We had a good enough time, but there was little sense of community or "shared tradition." There were fireworks, there were batting cages for the kids, there was a speed gun to see how fast you could pitch. And yet, you didn't have the sense of being part of something that stretched back in time.
For a positive sense of "shared tradition," I talked to a fellow Michigan Alumni who was at the graduation of his nephew from West Point a couple weeks ago. West Point is a place that drips tradition. You realize, this was where Robert E. Lee, and Ulysses Grant, and Pershing, and Patton, and Eisenhower, and countless others, spent four years. You sense the community in the "long grey line." You sense how all graduating officers have such a strong, strong sense of "shared tradition."
This is the kind of thing that we want, and that is draining away. It is almost as if Michigan football were on life support, and Brandon was applying leeches in the firm belief that this would heal things. Ok, maybe that image is over the top. And maybe more than Dave Brandon is to blame. But I wish there was a way to move forward, successfully, without desecrating the traditions and community so many of us Michigan grads identify with so strongly.
Brandon was going through the pockets of the patient, looking for loose change and credit cards."
FIFY.
This comment is right on point. The turnover in this site's attitude toward students since the GA debacle has been incredible. Move after move after move has been aimed at hitting the students and it's finally coming back to bite the AD. Getting rid of GA is a step in the right direction, but it's going to take a lot more than that to get the student body back on board and numbers back where they were.
People can take the "high and mighty" view toward the students all they want and rant about how back in their day the did this or that, but so many are out of touch with what the students have experienced. Actually thinking about what is going to get them to want to show up might be a different change of pace instead of thinking about ways to get more money from them and force them to show up. If people think the Big House is going to be a great atmosphere without the students, they will be in for a pretty big surprise.
Maybe a free pizza if they arrive to all home and away games 1 hour prior to kickoff is what students want...
One way to figure out what students want includes involving them in the process of policy formation. That's something the AD didn't do at all when coming up with its GA policy, and it designed the least functional seating policy of any sports organization I've ever seen.
I graduated in 2010. I bought season tickets for around $200 and put that on a credit card (CitiBank gave a 18 year old 5,000 in credit in 2006 with 5.9% APR.... fools).
The cost sucks but I did it because.... THIS IS MICHIGAN.
I can honestly say, regardless of talent on the field, $300 to a student working his way through college would be a major, major detriment. We forget that not everone on campus has tuition paid for and spending money subsidized my parents who want to continue the tradition of their kids going to Michigangames.
I really think that $300 (plus everything else) has to be somewhere around the breaking point for students.
Angelique put out another stellar article, calling students fickle and such:
http://www.detroitnews.com/article/20140606/SPORTS0201/306060041/Amid-f…
I mean, I hate to be that guy, but doesn't this seem a little....oh, I don't know, narrow minded? Granted, I'm not a student and haven't been since 2005, but in this day and age with raises being frozen, gas prices, parking fees, etc,. there's a lot more at play in students choosing to not go to the games than them simply being 'fickle'.
Sure, on field performance matters, but when I was in college, I had to depend on my parents helping me out to support weekend tailgates at Ann Arbor Pioneer (yeah, I went to U of M Flint, deal with it). It's totally understandable a segment of students out there simply can't afford gameday and everything that comes with it. Calling people names just seems ...well, it seems like the Detroit News.
I am not a big John Bacon fan, and I have a feeling that, as long as I can afford it, I will always go to Michigan football games, regardless of what Brandon or anyone else does. But he does make some good points in this piece, and I hope Brandon or his people read this and consider it. The students of today are the season ticket holders of the future. If they don't buy them while they're in college, they are far less likely to buy them once they graduate.
I went to Wayne Law. While I was there, many of my peers did not care for our dean. Now, they refuse to donate to the law school and instead choose to support their undergraduate school exclusively. This makes me so sad, but there is nothing to be done - they disliked the dean while we were there and that makes them not want to support the school. I feel like the same thing will happen with today's UM students - the athletic dept is leaving a bad taste in their mouths now that will not go away when they graduate.
I know the popular thing to do is bash Brandon for everything but this is something that is going on everywhere (I'm focusing on students for the time being). A majority of the BCS programs have had declining ticket sales for years and have had trouble with no shows, Michigan is not unique and its certainly not because of some stupid music during commercial breaks or Beyonce at halftime.
Bacon is increasingly sounding like the stubborn my way or the highway type fans who tried to run Richrod off before he even arrived on campus. I guarantee the no-show or no-buy students don't give flying fuck that they play commercials during breaks or pipe in music. Its 50-something year old "get off my lawn" types that protest that.
I'm sure if you polled all the students who didn't renew it would be either going to the game is too much of a pain in the ass or tickets have gotten too expensive.
Thats not to say Brandon is perfect, far from it. There was that disgrace of a rollout of GA seating (who the fuck thinks general admission means assigning seats in the order you walk in) and in at least 20 years they still haven't figured out how to get people into the stadium and in their seats in under an hour.
That being said, any attempt to assign all blame to him is misguided.
Well, to answer your question, yes, Brandon is a big part of the blame for why students are not buying tickets. If you go to campus and poll some students, I guarantee that their biggest problem would be with the GA ticket policy. The students (me included at the time), ranted endlessly about how it was going to be a terrible move. Students organized protests on campus over the GA policy. Were they huge? No, but we're talking about protests ... over a football seating policy. If that's happening, you have to realize there's going to be a problem.
Surprisingly, the GA seating policy was a complete failure and made the problem even worse than it was before. Not only was I personally told by people that they did not buy 2013 and 2014 tickets because of the policy, but others who did buy tickets told me that they intentionally went late to games to try and make the policy look worse. I'm not saying that's right or wrong, but I'm saying it to convey how much the students despised this seating policy. This is a policy that Brandon rolled out (for whatever reason) and turned the students against him. Brandon has made some moves that annoyed the students (neutral game locations, basketball seating, etc.), but nothing like this.
Whatever your opinion of the GA policy and the students' responses, this is easily the biggest thing that has led to this massive drop. On top of that, when you're trying to get more money out of a group that already has no money (college debt goes up each year), this kind of fallout should be expected. Later on, the AD went around after GA failed and tried to question the students about what kind of seating policy they wanted. Wouldn't this have made sense before introducing a new policy? If you are that out of touch with students about seating, you shouldn't be making fundamental changes to student ticket policies.
Not every problem is Brandon's fault, but I give him and the department at least 80-90% of the blame with the student issues. The students should be your most dedicated fans and are easily the loudest section of the crowd. Now, you're losing out on a huge hunk of crowd noise and future buyers because you not only wanted students to wait in line for 10 hours to see a game they didn't have to wait for before, but you also wanted them to pay more to do it. Anybody with common sense can see why this would turn the students against the AD.
Actually, Bacon makes clear that Brandon's terrible ideas with regard to student ticket policies are what alienated students. The crappy music, the blandification of the gameday experience, PSL, etc. are items that have upset alumni. At least DB has found a way to upset everyone!
"I guarantee the no-show or no-buy students don't give flying fuck that they play commercials during breaks or pipe in music."
I don't think that's the case for all of the students you're talking about. Some of them have undoubtedly grown up within the culture of Michigan Football as it was pre-Brandon and Martin. Many of them are the children of the GOML alums.
Sure, there are other factors at play, but I don't think you can dismiss this one out of hand.
come up with a policy decision to fix student attendance issues, you can dismiss rock music and commercials as a significant factor.
Will say, don't think that's a very significant factor for students. Also, I think it's worth noting that they aren't so much "commercials" as they are "commercials for the AD." I think that's an important distinction that a lot of people overlook.