On July 1st, the NBA lockout began. Team owners and players were unable to reach common ground on several matters. The primary issue is revenue distribution. Player’s salaries are also a major factor. The cost of recruiting and retaining star talent is a significant expense—particularly when anywhere between 10-22 of the 30 NBA teams aren’t turning a profit.
This isn’t the first time the NBA has had a lockout. It’s actually the fourth time. And the lockout phenomenon isn’t limited to basketball. The NFL is currently embroiled in a tangled web of contract negotiations, and no one is certain if there will be football this fall. Baseball has gone on strike 8 times; most recently in 1995.
How does the lockout phenomenon look from a Brand Modeling perspective?
Brand Modeling As A Tool For Decision Making
Brand Modeling has, as its core concept, that organizations grow and thrive when they focus on fulfilling the wants and needs of their best customers. These best customers—who buy from the organization both frequently and in quantity, who are active cheerleaders for the organization, and who recommend the organization to their family and friends, sometimes with intense enthusiasm—are called Brand Lovers.
Who are the NBA’s Brand Lovers? We could begin by considering the game’s biggest fans: the people who hold season tickets, who purchase exhaustive cable packages so they never miss a game, who wear team apparel and plan their lives around playoff season.
The next step is to identify what the NBA’s Brand Lovers love most about the game. What do they consider important about their relationship with professional basketball? What is the most meaningful aspect of basketball to them? Why do they shell out thousands of dollars for season tickets, year after year after year?
Many of these people will tell you it’s love of the game. They love seeing star athletes in action; they value the feeling of community and camaraderie that comes from being a fan. There’s more, of course, and a proper analysis would delve into the conscious and unconscious motivations underlying brand loyalty, but this is a good starting point.
Brand Modeling tells us that the route to organizational dominance is to give Brand Lovers what they want the most. The NBA’s Brand Lovers want to see great basketball. The lockout process gives us the polar opposite: the NBA’s Brand Lovers are losing what they value most while the latest labor dispute is being hashed out.
Will Brand Lovers Stay Patiently On The Sidelines?
It’s perilous to assume that they will. The NBA, NFL, and Major League Baseball do enjoy an enviable place in the marketplace: within their categories, they have no viable competition. That doesn’t mean they’re the only game in town. Brand Lovers who have specific needs—the need for exciting entertainment, the need to belong to a fan community, the need to identify with the victorious (or not so victorious!) athlete—can and will have that need met somewhere else. There are countless viable alternatives that meet those needs without demanding that fans suffer in silence while financial arrangements are hammered out. There’s NASCAR, there’s hockey, there’s extreme sports, there’s golf … the list is literally endless.
Making a decision that is so out of alignment with the Brand Lover’s wants and needs is bad business. No organization is immune from labor disputes. Every company has challenges. Brand Modeling provides the framework to guide organizations through these challenges: solutions need to be found that keep meeting the wants and needs of the Brand Lovers paramount. Fail to do that for too long, and it’s worse than a last minute missed free throw: it’s the ultimate airball that could spell the end of your brand.