6-4-3: The One P (Part One)

I’m a marketing snob. I’m over-educated on the topic, have too high an
opinion of my own marketing skills, read and enjoy haughty, peer-reviewed
journals, and tend to be way too quick to criticize what I perceive as
shortcomings in the planning and execution of others when it comes to
marketing. I have a relatively extensive background in marketing
entertainment products, ranging from traditional media to online products
with indirect revenue streams.

For all these reasons, I spend a fair amount of time pulling out my hair and
shouting profanity at my television when I see the promotion of Major League
Baseball.

First, a quick rundown of what marketing is, and what it isn’t. Marketing is
not advertising. Marketing is the planning and control of all facets of
bringing a product or line of products (including services) to the
marketplace. The irritating and misleading shorthand for this is called
"the four Ps"–Product, Pricing, Placement, and Promotion.

Promotion is the most visible of these items, and it includes advertising
and public relations. (This is the area where you’re most likely to see the
attractive women that people associate with marketing, and not, say, the BP
team.) The most important thing to keep in mind about each of these four Ps
is that it’s a really good idea to keep them aligned with each other. If you
have the best product in the space, you generally can have a higher price,
you want to distribute through desirable channels, and you want to
communicate, through promotion, the benefits of your product. You don’t see
Newform Research speakers
competing for space with Sony at Best Buy, and being advertised at INSANE!!!
prices.

Which brings us to baseball, specifically, baseball as presented by Fox.

MLB sold the product of a particular package of games (which we won’t get
into here) to Fox. These kinds of projects are usually profit-and-loss
standalone, at least to an extent, which means that Fox expects to make
money on the purchase and resale of these MLB games. How do they do that?
Well, they get advertisers to buy time on the broadcasts, for the privilege
of being largely ignored by the viewing audience when they click over during
the breaks between innings to TNN, ESPN, ABC, or, in the case of Fox News
fans, "The O’Reilly Factor" or The History Channel. (Wir
berichten. Sie entscheiden.) Fox makes their money on MLB indirectly–they
sell baseball to us, and they sell our attention to the advertisers. And
they curse TiVo, but that’s another column.

Here’s where the key tradeoff takes place.

Fox does its research on what they can expect in terms of ratings, revenue,
and viewer retention based on the recent history of MLB on television. They
then have a good idea of the numbers they can expect to get.

Somewhere along the line, though, one of the multitude of marketing managers
involved in such a project has an epiphany, and says something along the
lines of "Think of how much more revenue we could bring in if we just
had more ads to sell!" Meetings are held, assumptions are pulled from
various and sundry locations, and a deal is worked out with baseball in
which an additional 30 to 45 seconds is added to the gap between each
half-inning. The result? More ads and a longer game.

But Fox has, in my opinion, underestimated the effect of this change. This
relatively small adjustment rips the four Ps brutally out of alignment. The
Product is degraded significantly, becoming less enjoyable to watch. People
don’t enjoy ads; they put up with them as a necessary evil. The Price goes
up. It takes longer for all of us to watch the game, and time expenditure is
a big part of price consideration when you examine consumer behavior. People
do value their time, after all. But what really gets Foxed up is their
Promotion.

Fox promotes baseball in the only way it knows how to promote anything. It’s
young! It’s hip! It’s fast-moving! You’ve got your graphics of circa 1988
Transformers robots swinging shiny things to introduce fact snippets and
flashy on-screen interlude graphics. You’ve got half the screen chewed up by
an ever-evolving Fox Box (which is inconsistent, either showing an inflated
pitch velocity or not). You’ve got more shots between each pitch than a
Meth-loaded Travis Bickle at a sex-slave auction.

The contradiction is painful–Fox promotes baseball at a younger skew,
emphasizing the fast pace and big power of the game, and yet, slows the game
to a crawl in those few areas where it has control over the pace. The
result? Disappointed consumers, even before factoring in Steve Lyons.

Customers get into habits when it comes to price. If they’re used to paying
$3.99 for something, and the price goes up to $4.99, they get pissed off,
and are less likely to buy it in the future, even if the value to them is
way more than the $4.99 they’re not paying. The same thing is happening here
with postseason baseball on Fox. People are used to spending just under
three hours to watch a ballgame, and they want to watch the games at a
predictable time. But ratings are slipping as sawdust gets added to our
collective hamburger, and Fox is naturally passing the blame on to MLB where
they can. They paid a frigging fortune for the rights to broadcast these
games, and for whatever reason, the numbers simply aren’t coming in.

Why should we, as baseball fans, care?

The main reason we should care is the quality of the game on the field. I
truly believe that we are at the absolute zenith of baseball right now, at
least in terms of the game on the field. Baseball, as a potential career,
represents the best combination of longevity, salary, probability of
success, injury risk, and safety net in the case of failure. Where there is
a choice of sport for a given athlete, there’s a lot of incentive for that
great athlete to choose baseball. If baseball is marketed sub-optimally, the
desirability of the other sports relative to baseball will increase, and we
may start losing some of the best athletes to other sports. (Some would
argue that this is already the case–I’d disagree.)

That means potential disaster for those of us who love the game. Brian
Jordan has never been a player I’d want my beloved A’s to go out and
get, but I’m sure glad he’s playing baseball instead of football, compared
to the replacement player that would otherwise have his spot. More players
means more options, and more potential for exciting plays that take your
breath away. Derek Jeter may be a bad defensive shortstop, but he’s a
great and exciting baseball player, and he might well have the physical
skills to play football or basketball had he chose to do so.

And we’d all be the worse for it, as baseball fans. So let’s hope Fox starts
managing expectations a little better, and perhaps we should all pitch in
and watch "The X Files" for the first time in several years. It’ll
require less suspension of disbelief than a Fox radar gun that shows Tim
Hudson throwing 95 and Jamie Moyer throwing 90.

Gary Huckabay is an author of Baseball Prospectus. You can contact him by
clicking here.