Marketing Intelligence by Iain Johnston

So Nottingham Rugby Football Club brought in 1,000 blow up dolls to boost their crowd last week, did they? What a ridiculous idea.

Ok, they had far fewer empty seats, but unless they added canned crowd noise like some ‘70s sitcom, I can’t see it adding to the atmosphere. It would be rather unsettling in fact – a section of the home support sat there completely quiet and unmoving for the whole match. Come to think of it, didn’t Roy Keane complain that’s what growing sections of Old Trafford were getting like with all the prawn sandwich-eating hospitality guests?

But it got me to thinking about this desperate grasping at illusion over reality to try to get a different result, or at least make us feel better – “at least the stands were full”.

When I ask why we have lost a pitch (yes, it does happen), I have heard the response “our pitch was by far the best…”, and yet we didn’t win. The client chose another agency to work with them. So how can we have been the best? The only valid definition of “best” in these circumstances is the agency the client chose as being the best fit with their needs. If the client failed to see the intrinsic brilliance of our solution, then either:

1.         we were not the best, or

2.         we failed to communicate the brilliance of our approach

Either way we deserve to lose.