Scouting Report: Savannah Bananas

If you’ve heard of the Savannah Bananas, you either love them or hate them. Baseball traditionalists think they are ruining the game of baseball. Millions feel they are bringing back the joy of the game we used to love as a country.

As my first assignment as the newly minted Director of Experience for Social Media Examiner, I went to scout the Savannah Bananas. No, I wasn’t looking for talent to hire away; I went looking for ideas on how we can up our game in providing amazing experiences for our customers, speakers, sponsors, vendors, and staff.

Here are a few things I learned:

#1: Putting your fans first requires a mindset shift

The Savannah Bananas put everything they do through the filter of “how does this affect the customer experience?” If it doesn’t make it simpler or more entertaining, they don’t do it.

That sounds great until you bring profits into the equation. The Bananas include food, beverage, and taxes in their $20 ticket price. When you factor in all the personnel and operating costs that sounds like a very low-profit margin. Who would do that?

Jesse Cole explained, “I want the fan experience to be as simple as possible. A $20 ticket should be a $20 ticket, not a $26 ticket. My dad thinks I’m leaving so much money on the table, but I explained that we’re doing fine.”

How does he know? Games sell out in hours. Merchandise sales have exploded. Premium food and beverage sales keep increasing.

A “fans first” approach seems to fly in the face of profits first. But when you’re playing the long game it actually leads to customer loyalty. Heck, I even bought a t-shirt and hat at my first game (a $50 expense).?

#2: Control the Controllable

When Walt Disney built Disneyland it was because he didn’t want to leave the experience of his movies in the hands of movie theaters where he couldn’t control the end-to-end experience. He never knew if the theater would be clean or if the staff would be friendly. At a theme park, he controlled a lot more of the variables.

Likewise, the Savannah Bananas hire great baseball players who are also excellent entertainers. All of them can dance and many of them have extra skills like the rodeo cowboy, the golfer, or the stilts walker.

Because they play real baseball games, the Bananas can’t control who wins the game, how many hits happen, or if the game starts to become boring. They have changed the rules to control as many elements as possible, but they have to be ready for the unexpected.

What that means is they have a deep library of stunts and audience engagement activities that they use throughout the game. Many of them are planned for the natural lulls (between innings, while a batter walks to the plate, etc…). Others can be pulled in when the game starts to slow down (t-shirt giveaways, crowd sing-offs, the pep band playing in the stands).

Great events have plans for all the uncontrollable moments at their event where they need to intervene to shift the vibe or solve a broken moment.

#3: Break the Fourth Wall

In theater, television, or movies, directors refer to the fourth wall as the invisible barrier that separates the audience from the stage. Rarely will you see an actor look directly at the camera or come off the stage. When they do it’s for a very specific reason.

The same barrier exists in baseball—especially in the professional realm. So when the players intentionally break the fourth wall to engage with fans it creates memorable moments.

At a Savannah Bananas game, it’s happening constantly. Before the game, one hundred VIP ticket holders come onto the field 45 minutes early to get autographs from the players, watch rehearsals, and then lead the players in the pre-game parade. During the game, players come into the stands to celebrate winning the inning, honor military veterans, lead sing-offs, and for special celebrations. After the game, the players dance with fans, sign autographs, and get the fans to sign their jerseys.

The result of all this interplay is that fans feel like they are part of the experience instead of just spectators. Imagine what would happen at traditional conferences if speakers stayed for the whole event, sang karaoke at the bar, took pictures, and had spontaneous conversations with anyone and everyone. What if the speakers were part of the welcome team and stayed until the very end of the event? What if your speakers and sponsors created special experiences around the event that enhanced the experience?

#4: Plan the Emotional Journey

As a worship pastor, one of the things I consider when planning a weekend service or retreat was the emotional, mental, and physical journey people were on. If my audience is elderly, I don’t like to ask them to stand for too long or move excessively. If the message was going to be emotional, I would often follow it with a song that moves from that energy to a celebratory feel. The question I would ask myself was, “What is the audience thinking, feeling, and doing at the end of this segment? And where do we want to invite them next?”

I never want to manipulate an audience’s feelings. Too many preachers and events get a bad rap for playing on people’s emotions. That’s not what we’re talking about.

To illustrate, let me show you how the Savannah Bananas think about the emotional journey. Everything they do is built around the baseball game. They can’t predict the outcome of the game or even how a given inning will play out—did I mention it’s a real game of baseball? But they can focus on how to keep the fans engaged. If the game is slow, they need to pick people’s energy up with some upbeat and interactive songs or dances. If the game is already moving along quickly, then they’ll throw in a feel-good moment like thanking the military.

Zack, the director of entertainment, described it as building an emotional rollercoaster. Nobody can handle the constant of coming down the first hill and even fewer want to stay on the upward slope of the first hill. They’re willing to do those things early in the game, but then it’s about creating surprises with laughter, shouting, singing, dancing, or seeing a surprise engagement on the field. The goal is to keep people engaged and expectant.?

Most baseball games see the fans start to leave as soon as the game’s outcome is obvious. But the Savannah Bananas keep fans so engaged that they don’t want to miss anything. Even if they have attended numerous games, they want to see some of the traditions or look for the new or previously missed items.?

One of the designers at Disney said he wants someone on their 20th ride to see something they’ve never seen before. That takes incredible attention to detail and awareness of how people see and experience your event.

#5: Experiment Constantly

Wayne Gretsky said, “You miss 100% of the shots you don't take."?

The philosopher Voltaire also said, “Perfect is the enemy of good.” And Winston Churchill added, “Perfection is the enemy of progress.”

If all of these smart and successful people understand this, why do so many of us get caught in the quality trap? At Social Media Examiner, we place a premium on quality and service. But when you have an organization full of perfectionists, we found that sometimes we would be stymied by this so we now also say “published is better than perfect.” It doesn’t mean we don’t care about quality it just means we are more willing to experiment and learn.

I asked Jesse Cole about how he sees the tension between quality and quantity. He replied, “Quantity leads to quality. We learn through constant experimentation.”?

To back this up he told me how in their early days they challenged themselves to introduce one element to every game that had “never been done on a baseball field” before. Later he increased that to performing at least three new experiments per game. Now he challenges the team to try five or more new promotions in every game. His reason: “I want to learn five times faster than everyone else.”

One of the ways he supports this is by following a similar weekly schedule as the Saturday Night Live show. Mondays are dedicated to brainstorming potential new stunts. Tuesday is a day for reviewing the first drafts of the scripts for the ones selected. Wednesday is a read-through with all the departments involved. On Thursday they fine-tune the scripts and then they rehearse and perform on Friday and Saturday. After the games end on Saturday night, they talk through what worked and what didn’t. Then they rinse and repeat.

Experimentation requires a process and a willingness to fail. Some of the stunts they planned while I was there didn’t work. For “The World’s Slowest Race” four out of six entrants didn’t even show up. The first-ever pitcher on stilts couldn’t perform because it was too windy. All the men trying out for the Man Nanas (think cheerleaders with Dad bods) decided to start stripping off their shirts—it was awkward.

But they also had a viral moment when the team emerged doing the Harlem Shake while dressed in wacky costumes.

In baseball, a hitter is considered really good when he gets a hit 33% of the time. The Savannah Bananas get hits a lot more often than that with their stunts. And many of them are home runs.

I have many more lessons I learned, but I’ll save describing those for a future scouting report.

For now, I recommend you pick up Jesse’s new book: Fans First. I suggest you order it from his company. The shipping is free and the experience when you open it is priceless. Go here: https://thesavannahbananas.com/product/fans-first-book/