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Sunday, November 9, 2008
MARKETING 101Although most of you have come to know me as a writer (if you are nice enough to actually call it that)
my first chosen career was in the field of marketing. Well, to be completely accurate, it was more like bowler, then confused
college student, then marketer, then video producer, then writer. To be honest, I still consider myself most of these things
(plus a few more – dad, husband, couch potato, etc.) and a lot of times those interests will cross and provide me with
new and interesting (well, interesting to me at least) perspectives on long-standing problems or situations.
One
of these problems is the decline of competitive bowling over the past 30 years. Anyone can order a copy of The Bowlers Encyclopedia
and read its depressing chart tracking the declines in league bowling since its peak in 1978…on average 5% per year
(without a single year of increase) with a shocking 70% of the 10 million league bowlers from the ’78 high-water mark
now gone. Harvard sociologist Robert Putnam wrote an excellent book (Bowling Alone, released by Simon and Schuster in 2000)
outlining a number of theories to explain these declines (in addition to similar declines in other social activities and membership
organizations). I have also heard dozens more well-supported reasons from folks in the bowling industry as well.
As someone with a marketing background, I like having this information because it helps in evaluating a potential solution,
which, in business, is absolutely necessary for survival. If we think of league bowling simply as a product, then using some
basic marketing tools it is fairly easy to see what’s going on and what the solution is.
In the world
of marketing, every product has something called a Product Life Cycle, which is basically a chart that tracks the sales volume
of a given product over time. Usually, the graph of a typical PLC looks like the hump of a camel, with the line representing
sales slowly increasing from left to right until it reaches a peak then, at some point, beginning to descend back down to
the floor. Sometimes these graphs ascend more rapidly than others (iPods or the Harry Potter books). Sometimes
they flatten out at the top for a long time (Coca-Cola Classic or Levis 501 Jeans). Sometimes, they come crashing down
at a very steep angle (parachute pants or hula hoops). And sometimes they may never even get off the ground. So to me,
the league bowling participation chart published in The Bowlers Encyclopedia is nothing more than a Product Life Cycle.
Now, within the PLC model, marketers then look at the PLC and categorize the product it represents into one of four
groups: Question Mark, Star, Cash Cow or Dog. Products start out as Question Marks ("What will become of this?"),
then become Stars (high growth and profits), then Cash Cows (returning cash without much investment or effort), and eventually
Dogs, where they are killed off or allowed to die on their own accord. There are also customer bases associated with each
of these phases of the PLC, with Early Adopters in front (on the PLC’s ascent), followed Mainstreamers (as the curve
begins to reach its peak), followed by Late Adopters (as the curve moves along its apex and begins to descend), followed by
Laggards (who buy in on the descent…incidentally, this would be a good explanation of my personal investment strategy
up to this point which is why I don’t consider “investor” on that list of things I call myself).
As a marketer, if I were to assess and categorize league bowling as a product I would say that it is somewhere between a
Cash Cow and a Dog (but definitely much closer to a Cash Cow and still a long way from being a Dog). On the other hand,
recreational bowling would be a Star, which is why it is favored (rightly) by so many bowling center proprietors (who are
probably the most business-minded individuals in the industry today, by the way) these days. So how do we make league
bowling into a star again?
The answer is that we need to activate a group of Early Adopters to lead the charge
and make league bowling cool again. To me, these Early Adopters are a small group of people and are broken up into two
groups. The first group is made up of the hard-core high-average bowlers. These are the folks who are the most
passionate about bowling and spend the highest concentration of their time in the bowling center. They are an invaluable resource
for spreading the word about how entertaining, rewarding and fulfilling competitive bowling can be. The second group
is made up of hip, cool, young recreational bowlers who frequent the lanes multiple times each year but have not yet ventured
into the realm of league bowling. Just a moderately-sized group of these individuals plugged into the league bowling
base acting as a conduit between the league and recreational bowling pools could rapidly inject life into the league bowling
customer base and increase membership levels significantly. Kind of like what Paris Hilton has done for big sunglasses and
annoying undersized dogs.
OK, so what tools do we have at our disposal to get the PLC moving in the right direction?
Now we’re talking about what marketers refer to as “The Four P’s,” namely: Product, Price, Placement
and Promotion. The Product is league bowling itself, which, I would argue, has not exactly proven its ability to sustain its
own growth over the past 30 years. Let’s face it, league bowling is no iPod. Next is Price. I’m pretty sure
lowering or raising the price of league bowling is not the answer (especially not raising it…duh). What about
Placement? Well, I can’t think of too many bowling centers in the country that do not offer league bowling, so Placement
is not an answer in and of itself (although it will definitely help us to Promote it…oops, did I just give away the
answer…once we get momentum going in our favor). So that leaves us with Promotion. The answer is we need to promote
league bowling more. Now I know what a lot of you out there are thinking…you had me waste 15 minutes of my time reading
this PLC/Marketing/Early Adopters/Cash Cows/Four P’s junk to tell me that we need to promote league bowling more?
I could have told you that!!!!!
Yes, but how do you promote something with a finite amount of resources? (read:
no money for TV commercials, print ads, promotional design, printing and distribution, etc.) Current USBC president Jeff Boje
seems to be on to the answer. In a recent interview with Bowlers Journal he said, “we need to talk to the league bowlers
more.” And now that we know who the right customer groups (hard-core bowlers and frequent recreational bowlers)
are that we need to employ to talk to them, we can come up with ideas that will incentivize these groups for their help in
converting casual or non-bowlers into league bowlers at little or no cost to those of us seeking out the promotion. I am working
on one of these ideas myself (although it is in too early a stage to discuss here) and I know a lot of other groups and individuals
within the bowling industry who are working on their own solutions. My advice to you is to seek out these programs and offer
your help, because if you are reading this, then more than likely you are one of the trend-setters bowling needs to help make
league bowling into a Star once again! Please do your part to help and, if there is anything I can do to help you with your
own ideas, please let me know!
See you next week!
jason@jasonthomasbowling.com
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LIVIN' THE DREAM:
How
to get what you want, find true meaning and save the world by bowling!
AN INTERVIEW WITH THE AUTHOR
Q:
What is the book about?
A: The book is about how the valuable
lessons I learned through my lifelong involvement in bowling saved my life and transformed me from an unhappy cynic into a
blissfully happy optimist.
Q: What made you decide to write it?
A: I had been out of the bowling industry for about two years and I had hit a very low point in my attitude about
life. Through the help of a family member, I was able to rediscover the important lessons about success, spirituality and
connecting with others. I was so excited about this transformation that I decided to write a book that attempts to detail
the metamorphosis while outlining the important lessons I remembered.
Q: How is this
book different from other self-help books?
A: The book is different in a number
of ways. First, I am a very unlikely person to have written a self-help book. If you had known me before I'd written the book,
you'd know precisely what I mean. But that fact alone reveals how strongly I felt about writing it, because I knew that if
I could change for the better, then I felt anyone could do it and that there was a good chance that I could help a lot of
people by describing the process and arranging the pieces in a way that could be easily understood.
The
other key point of difference is the way the book is arranged. The story is structured into three parts, The Method, Some
Cool Tricks and For the Hard-Core Cynics, each of which contain the important lessons I wanted to share. Every chapter is
also broken up with a narrative of my personal story, told for the purpose of detailing my amazing attitude transformation.
It begins with the extremely low point when others felt the need to reach out to help me to remember the important things
in life and goes on to detail the many people that helped me to learn the most important life lessons, including: my childhood
friend Robert Smith, my father (a former President of Disneyland International), PBA Chairman Chris Peters and former PBA
CEO Steve Miller.
Q: Is the book as funny as your blogs?
A: Yes! But there is also a serious side too.
Q: How is your book different from
something like The Secret?
A: My book is similar to The Secret
in that it proposes a method for success, but it is different in a number of ways. First, it is a bit more practical when
it comes to outlining the method for achieving success. The Secret comes very close to describing a similar method
for success in its "Ask, Believe, Receive" mantra. In my book, the first two of these elements ("Ask"
and "Believe") are integral (although I call them "Dream" and "Self-Belief"), but I believe
there has to be some proactive work done to achieve the goal. I call it hard work (which turns a lot of people off, of course)
but to use the model of The Secret, you would simply replace the word "Receive" with "Retrieve."
The best part of all this (and the good news for the folks who don't want to have to work hard) is that once you decide on
what you want and then you begin to believe you can get it, the work is no longer hard, but becomes a fun activity that fills
your days with joy and purpose.
Second, my book spends a significant amount of time discussing
how to deal with your success once you've attained it (and that conducting yourself in this manner before
you reach your goals will actually help you get there even faster). Probably the best way to describe my
book is that it's a cross between The Secret and the late Randy Pausch's book, The Last Lecture.
But I also quote a number of more research-driven books like Malcolm Gladwell's Blink, Sam Harris' The
End of Faith and Steven Pinker's The Blank Slate to help me make my point.
Q: Do you have to be a bowler to like this book?
A: Absolutely
not! Bowling obviously plays a major role (although it really serves more as the setting rather than as the primary focal
point) because of my involvement with the sport my whole life. But the lessons bowling taught me are lessons I could have
learned if I had chosen to be a golfer or a doctor or a writer (oops, I guess that one's a bad example now). My hope is that
the book will find its way into the hands of people who don't bowl and that these people will come away with a new appreciation
for bowlers and the sport of bowling.
Q: What is your goal with the book?
A: That is a simple one. To help as many people as possible to experience the gift of embracing an optimistic way
of life and to help them reap its many rewards. 
