Real-life Games

I sat in my chair yesterday evening at 5:00pm CST and anxiously awaited CBS to reveal the tournament bracket for the 2011 NCAA Men’s Basketball Tournament. There’s a show for it…every year…in prime time…and is one of the most popular sporting “events” that does not actually involve the sport itself. Sure, I’ve got a team that I root for relentlessly, but the cache of the tournament has very little to do with your team; it’s about the game.

Think fantasy football or the movie “Rat Race“. These things tap into the competitive part of our psyche, but what makes them unique is the real-life nature of the playing board. We’re much less fascinated with moving pieces around a board and putting it back in the box when the game’s over. We still want to play, and we still want to win, but we’ve firmly jumped on board with the concept that we can play these games with the actions of real people – and that makes it far more engaging. And we spend exponentially more time playing (or watching to see if we got it right). Ultimately, we want to root for someone. Very few watch sporting events where they don’t care about the outcome. We begin to care about the outcome when there’s a story we’re following or a game we’re playing, which directly affects whether we win or lose. And that’s what we want right? We want consumers to care and become emotionally invested…maybe even evangelists for your brand.

If you’ve read any marketing/branding book, you probably know that telling stories is essential to creating emotional attachment to your team / brand. Have you ever thought about giving them a low-risk, real-life game to play? I specify “low-risk” because if you’re a publicly-traded company, investors are already playing a real-life game, but your consumers can’t take that level of risk. No specific ideas here, but an application to think about. This is a very real aspect of our current media-driven culture that heavily impacts the revenue success of college basketball and the NFL – but it’s rarely tapped into.