GROW2020 and the Savannah Bananas are all about monkey business . . . and it works!

Jessie Cole, the owner who transformed the Savannah Bananas minor league baseball team into a. . . well, a baseball circus, was the opening keynote at GROW2020. Dressed in one of his seven screaming yellow banana tuxedos, he shared actionable strategies that have led the Bananas to consistently sell out crowds.

In short, the Bananas spend their marketing energy and money on creating remarkable customer experiences leading to viral word-of-mouth fandom. They do crazy things. The video below is just one of them.

After the GROW2020 high energy keynote, Jesse led a personal workshop on how to model the process. He guided us through a simple set of activities and questions, causing us to think differently about what our customer experiences in doing business with each of us. Everyone came away with provocative ideas on how to create their own set of viral fans.

A few points that you can see in my sketchnotes below:

1. Find the friction in the "normal" customer experience and smooth those points
2. Make the customer experience so remarkable that they talk about it
3. Imagine the PFT (Perfect Fan Testimonial) and then build out that experience
4. Make them say, "You wouldn't believe. . . !"

When this is how a business conference starts, great things can happen. At GROW2020, they did!