Sports Center’s Myth Treatment

ESPN’s Sports Center was certainly a well-produced sports program. But its iconic value stemmed from qualities beyond just good journalism and production values. Unlike any other sports news show, Sports Center provided its viewers—the vast majority of them men—with a new way of experiencing sport as myth.

Because ESPN is a television network, its iconic qualities evolved differently from those of Budweiser, Volkswagen, and Mountain Dew. Although advertising played a key supporting role, ESPN’s storytelling happened primarily in its broadcasts rather than its ads.

ESPN’s broadcast journalists lauded the pure athlete: the athlete who thrived on intensive competition, worked to develop superior skills, and exhibited the right attitude, the gumption, and the tenacity to keep fighting the toughest battles. Pure athletes possessed little interest in the commercial and celebrity side of sport. Instead, they lived to experience the ideals of athletic achievement and its correlates: aggression, danger, teamwork, determination, and domination.

Jocks had been celebrated before, but ESPN’s treatment of them was special because the network so zealously scrutinized individual athletes. ESPN delivered to the audience the athletes’ psyches laid bare—their personalities, their biographies, their difficulties, their character defects, warts and all—to spotlight how competitive athletes approach their lives. Through these psychologically penetrating interpretations of the day’s sport stories, the Sports Center broadcasts invited their mostly male audience to try on the mind-set of the pure athletes, to identify with their tenacious habits and competitive drive and to join in berating their opposites.

One way ESPN enticed viewers—many of whom had rarely competed in team sports since adolescence—to identify with the pure athlete was to demonstrate the myth’s expansive relevance. While ESPN’s bread-and-butter offerings were the major team sports, the network continually showed that pure athletes could be found everywhere if only one looked hard enough. The channel enthusiastically showcased middle-aged guys competing on small motorcross bikes around a backyard track in Orange County using the same pure sport lens. Unlike any sports media before it, ESPN presented the case that both amateurs and armchair jocks could be pure sportsmen if only they adopted the right attitude.

Authentic Populist Voice: The Pure Athlete

Relying on the same principles that other iconic brands followed, Sports Center developed an authentic relationship with the populist world of competitive athletes by demonstrating its commitment to these athletes and its intimacy with them. For starters, unlike typical reporters of the day—who were usually talking heads reading from TelePrompTer material written by scriptwriters—ESPN reporters were hard-core sports fans who worked more like a beat sports reporter for a local newspaper. They knew their material cold and wrote all their own copy, often improvising on top of it. Their style grew from the network’s early days, when the major broadcast networks viewed ESPN as a threat and wouldn’t provide clips of game highlights as they did to the local affiliate television stations. Lacking highlight videotape, improvisers like Chris Berman and Dick Vitale, and later the famous duo Keith Olbermann and Dan Patrick, learned to excel at describing action that the viewer couldn’t see.

In Sports Center’s early years, an anchor often enthusiastically described, off the cuff and with impeccable insider knowledge, any game, either a contest still under way or one recently completed. At any moment, anchors would have to fill time by talking about their favorite players, statistics, or all-time great battles. To this day, audiences listen as much to the ESPN broadcaster’s voice as they watch the highlights. Because television is essentially a visual medium, what was initially considered a constraint—limited highlight tape—helped Sports Center create an intimacy with the sport that the prior highlights programs had lacked.

ESPN’s “This is Sports Center” ad campaign worked wonderfully to build claims to authenticity. The campaign was the first to rely on mockumentaries— parodies of documentary films—as exemplified by the widely adored heavy-metal film spoof, Spinal Tap. The campaign satired the trueto-life backstage activities of Sports Center’s anchors (arguing over the wording in a report, putting on their own makeup in the restroom). The signature creative element of the campaign was to bring in famous athletes to play funny, self-deprecating roles, using insider sports humor to interact with ESPN’s anchors backstage or off-camera in the plain-Jane ESPN newsroom in Bristol, Connecticut. Because the satires were so funny, especially for athletes, it soon became a badge of honor among star athletes to appear in a spot. As viewers came to understand that athletes wanted to appear in the ads and did so for free, the ads became less commercials than little time-out skits that celebrated the bond between great athletes and ESPN.

ESPN’s less-than-polished anchors and its humble settings also worked to symbolize the network’s commitment to athletes. Founded in Bristol, Connecticut, the network was never moved. The on-air personalities constantly made lighthearted jokes about the place, demonstrating that the network was a populist haunt, neither big-business nor Hollywood. The humble location of its headquarters allowed ESPN to be a populist champion amid the overcommercialized hype of professional sport.

Likewise, the well-known back stories of beloved personalities like Berman reinforced ESPN’s credibility. Though many reporters and personalities were accomplished print journalists, others were simply sports junkies (a term supposedly coined by an early ESPN employee) who bull-rushed their way into the spotlight with knowledge, passion, and quirkiness. They embodied the antithesis of Hollywood polish. And, like the athletes they covered, their speech and manners exuded physicality, attitude, and grit.

Charismatic Aesthetic: The Locker Room

ESPN treated the viewer much as its early journalists treated each other, like athletes and rabid fans. Because they were so immersed in the athlete’s world and so passionate about it, the ESPN journalists became proselytizers for the athletes’ values. The network defined itself by imposing an occupational boundary: Only people who identified totally with athletes were allowed in the conversation. To enter the world of ESPN was to imagine oneself as a fellow insider. The network made room for the rotund, middle-aged sales manager who hadn’t laced up athletic shoes since puberty as long as he came to the broadcast as a jock.

Because most brands embed myths into inert products, their charisma stems from marketing communications. Service offerings can also sometimes create myths with creative store design and service interactions. In contrast, ESPN’s charisma sprang directly from its on-air personalities, especially Olbermann and Patrick’s performances on Sports Center. ESPN personalities routinely offered aggressive opinions, which they passionately supported with evidence as if they were on a college debate team. The network taught fans how to watch sports as an athlete watches his peers, not as a spectator watches professionals.

The anchors routinely stood up against ESPN management as standard-bearers for pure sport. Sports reporting, like any other national reporting, was a dignified, professional field before ESPN anchors entered. While ESPN management tried to build professional style and credentials to match the broadcast networks, its reporters would have none of it. Instead, these Young Turks developed their own rambunctious, often potty-mouthed style that quickly won over men around the nation. For instance, Berman developed his “Bermanisms”—goofy nicknames for athletes whose play he found notable. When management forbade his unprofessional clowning, Berman responded creatively, with his own on-air protest. He began to identify highlighted players by their full names, as though he were reading from their drivers licenses, speaking each name with deadpan accuracy. The viewers, used to his playful, ridiculous nicknames, understood his sudden lack of emotion as an ironic checkmate, a rebellious shot at management. Fans jammed the network’s phone lines and fax machines, telling ESPN that they missed Berman’s quirky ad-libbing. Perhaps more embarrassing to management, the fans also made it clear that they understood Berman’s insubordination and that they approved of it nearly as much as his nicknames. Management soon relented, and Berman returned to his improvisational form.

Before ESPN, the major networks treated their audiences as minimally knowledgeable spectators. They hired broadcasters to describe the action and to teach the audience how to appreciate what they were viewing. Sportscasters generally channeled the story “on the field” to the audience in a fawning tone, respectful of the heroes on the field.

ESPN upended this convention, treating athletes as peers. Sports Center journalists acted as if they were sitting in the locker room with fellow players. The commentators lauded the play of some who deserved it and berated others aggressively if they performed poorly or rejected the proper, pure athlete values. Consider one of the legendary Sports Center moments—an episode that ESPN devotees retell over and over, the way devotees of other brands describe breakthrough ads.

Sports Center showed videotape in which track star Carl Lewis sang the national anthem before a New Jersey Nets basketball game. Although Lewis was periodically the world’s fastest sprinter, he was, unfortunately, one of its worst singers. Sports Center’s audience would have derived a good chuckle from a clip of Lewis singing. The Sports Center team, however, let the tape roll, showing the athlete in close-up as he maimed the entire song. As Lewis stumbled, the NBA fans in the arena began to boo, and the tape’s audio track picked up their derision. The Sports Center anchors, Charley Steiner and Jack Edwards, could be heard trying, and failing, to suppress their laughter. When Lewis had finished butchering the anthem, Steiner and Edwards reappeared on screen, both completely overcome by hysterical laughter. Neither was capable of continuing the show. Steiner’s face glowed crimson and tears streamed down his cheeks. He tried to speak, but could only stutter. Edwards cradled his face in his hands, unable even to look at the camera.

To understand how Lewis’s bad singing—and the anchors’ insolence—could have so moved Sports Center fans, it’s important to understand that many fans viewed Lewis as a phenomenal, but self-absorbed athlete, a poster child for the antithesis of the pure sport ethos. As a college athlete, Lewis was the world’s top-ranked 100-meter sprinter and won three events at the U.S. nationals, an unheard-of feat. The following year, he won four gold medals at the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics. But one of his performances caused fans to wonder if he deserved their admiration. On his first attempt (competitors get six tries), he thought he’d jumped far enough in the long jump to win. To save his strength for his other races, he walked away from his other jumps, leaving others to try to beat his first. The fans who’d paid hundreds of dollars to get in the stadium weren’t pleased and booed him. They wanted to see him try to break Bob Beamon’s world record, which had stood since the 1968 Olympics.

After his incredible performance, Lewis made no secret about his desire to parlay his Olympic gold into endorsement loot. When the marketing offers failed to match his expectations, he was displeased and said so.

Although Lewis was audibly bitter about what he perceived to be his second-class fame, he continued to dominate competitors on the track. Nobody had ever defended 100-meter or long-jump Olympic gold medals, but Lewis did both.

Lewis regularly crowed about his own impressive feats. After winning the 100-meter race at the 1991 Tokyo World Championships, he congratulated himself, then condescended to those who may or may not have understood the depth of his accomplishment. “The best race of my life,” Lewis said. “The best technique, the fastest. And I did it at thirty.”

Sports fans devoted to the pure athlete ethos didn’t care for Lewis. They thought he needed a good dose of comeuppance, and when Sports Center delivered the insult, fans loved it.

Olbermann and Steve Levy shared another of Sports Center’s most famous playtimes. ESPN’s commentators were renowned for favoring scatological locker room banter, including one infamous incident in which an injury report about a player’s bulging disk in his back was misspoken by a reporter as a “bulging dick.” For the remainder of the show, the anchors riffed themselves to tears, using and reusing the silly miscue like a pair of high-school cutups. Fans not only loved their shtick, but also talked about the anchors’ irreverence for years.

ESPN management occasionally suspended Olbermann and others for behavior deemed inappropriate or detrimental to the company’s image. To fans, these punishments only enhanced the anchors’ reputations. Once, after Olbermann spatted with management and served a suspension, coanchor Patrick surprised him on the air by saying, “Where the hell have you been?” Olbermann, a little surprised, nevertheless replied crisply, “I overslept.” Viewers were well aware that the classroom brat Olbermann had landed in hot water and had been punished. Yet to fans, this was a wink and a nudge from their heroes, demonstrating to them that the clowns had to serve a little time-out now and then, but that the bad boys still ran the show.

Olbermann also showed fans that when it came to speaking his mind about celebrities whom he considered overrated, Steiner had nothing on him. One of Olbermann’s more famous on-air comments was a gurgly, gagging sound, used to indicate an athlete’s choking, or failure to perform under intense pressure. During a Bulls-versus-Sonics NBA finals game, when the highlights from the first game in Seattle showed the obligatory celebrities in the stands, the shots included pop saxophonist Kenny G, a Seattle native whose sentimental music many men found too syrupy. Where most sportscasters would have said, “There’s Kenny G,” Olbermann coughed up one of his signature “Gggggghh!” sounds, indicating his distaste for Kenny’s music, not to mention his long, thin, somewhat effete curly hair. It’s difficult to imagine another nationally known sportscaster, like ABC’s Monday Night Football announcer Al Michaels, commenting with a gagging sound when his show’s camera showed a celebrity.

ESPN was like a locker room full of athletes. As journalists, Olbermann and his comrades enacted the same man-of-action sensibilities as that of their favored athletes. The sportscasters, extremely accomplished and passionate guys, were not going to take orders from anyone when those directives violated first-order values. Rather than simply report sports, ESPN’s anchors had picked up the ethos of the athletic community and brought it into the broadcast booth.

Followers: The Brand’s Magnets

Followers, as the moniker suggests, are those customers who identify strongly with the brand’s myth. They rely on the myth as a panacea for the desires and anxieties they experience in their everyday lives. As a result, followers become devoted to the performer of the myth—the brand—because it provides for their identity needs and acts as a moral compass. In previous chapters, to simplify the exposition, I’ve implied that all customers are followers. This is certainly not true. But followers do form the nucleus of the icon’s customer base, for they find the greatest value in its myth.

ESPN’s followers are mostly men, often fathers with children. Team sport is the primary domain of myth in their lives, the place where they go to get emotionally involved in heroic activities. Followers deeply personalize the pure-athlete ethos preached by ESPN. In their view, sport is a sacred world that should be cordoned off from the profanities of the marketplace. They look to sport to dramatize not just winning, but, as the old saying goes, “how you play the game.” Followers build a moral hierarchy around sports and find almost as much value in losing as they do in winning, because losing provides powerful parables about manhood. This moral hierarchy shapes how followers experience sport. They greatly admire some players and teams and viciously scorn others. For instance, if an athlete is playing for statistics to enhance his market value—and by implication, places his team’s interest second to his own—followers will loathe him. Followers admire overachievers, athletes who aren’t necessarily the best but who are known for always playing hard, never quitting, and exceeding expectations. Showboaters, on the other hand—athletes who don’t learn the game as apprentices and who don’t respect the game’s traditions—are booed mercilessly.

These tenets animate followers’ game experiences and shape how they create pleasures in their spectating. Sports spectating is the glue that followers use in their social life at work, among friends, and, if they have kids, at home. Followers work mostly in organizational settings, mostly with other men, where sports talk is the lingua franca. They understand themselves as serious sports fans and find great joy in sharing their dedication with like-minded others. They take enormous pride in their teams’ performances and feel strong solidarity with other fans of the home teams. Nonetheless, followers usually watch sports alone at home, or with their children if they have them. Only occasionally do followers congregate with other men, when they attend games in person or when they watch important games such as playoffs.

Spectator sports comprise an oral tradition. The value of sport resides in the lore of its stories that are passed around in everyday talk. Followers forge a personal connection to these stories primarily through their relationships with the local home teams and players. They build these relationships by weaving together their own autobiography with the team’s biography over long periods. Being a fan is about developing an intimate and durable relationship with the team through its players, establishing a shared history. It’s a badge of honor to have rooted for a hapless team over several struggling seasons. Followers view their loyalty as tangible proof of a genuine relationship. Relationships with teams and their players are measured by time and the accumulation of milestones that show the strength of the commitment: driving long distances to see games, sitting in bad weather until the last whistle, watching every game during a season even though it costs political points with the family.

Followers continually assert the quality of their relationships with teams through stories (“I remember when . . .”) and intimate contacts (“I met so-and-so at a bar. . . .”). For example, one man’s Chicago Cubs stories included his catching a ball in a fishnet in the bleachers at Wrigley Field, his memory of the horrors of the 1969 Cubs’ choking against the New York Mets in September, and his drive in from the suburbs to join in the joyous postgame drinking festivities when the Cubs clinched the 1984 pennant. Followers also assert their relationship through the accumulation of memorabilia, often displayed in “shrine rooms.” Usually in the basement den or study, the shrine room is a vast historical record documenting a man’s relationship with teams and players.

Brand Loyalty as Fealty to Charismatic Authority. Followers view the ESPN journalists who anchor Sports Center as their fun-loving high priests and tour guides, leaders who create a moral universe by translating the day’s sports into parables. This loyal constituency counts on the network to spin the day’s sports events into poignant tales that reveal the core values of pure sport. By having an imaginary conversation with the anchors, followers test out their analyses and evaluations against their mentors’ views. Since followers understand ESPN as the fount of sports wisdom and information, they, by paying close attention to ESPN and acting as the channel’s acolytes, anoint themselves as serious fans. They learn from ESPN how to view sports from an athlete’s point of view and use this vantage point to communicate with their friends. Ultimately, ESPN teaches followers how to be part of the rarefied world of pure sport, a place where previously only real athletes were allowed.

The relationships between followers and ESPN looks nothing like the brand relationships described by branding experts. Scholars who have advanced emotional branding emphasize the interpersonal qualities of brand-customer relationships. They argue that intimacy, reciprocity, and dependability drive loyalty.³ Instead, ESPN’s followers display a type of dependency that is characteristic of people who identify with charismatic leaders. ESPN’s followers feel little reciprocity with the channel. The channel doesn’t go out of its way to personalize the ESPN experience or build trust with its audience. Rather, the relationship is more paternalistic. Followers look up to ESPN as do followers of political leaders and celebrated artists. ESPN doesn’t need to forge a personal connection with its core customers to earn their devotion. Followers have no problem personalizing their relationship with ESPN in do-it-yourself fashion. Rather, to earn devotion, ESPN must continue to exert credible cultural leadership.

Insiders: Populist Legitimacy

Insiders are the gatekeepers to the brand’s claims on the populist world. Although usually much smaller in number than followers (survey data suggests that insiders constitute less than 10 percent of ESPN’s audience), insiders have powerful influence. They often hold the brand in considerably less esteem than do followers, partly because the brand competes with them for leadership within the populist world. Nonetheless, insiders are a crucial constituency because they wield considerable influence on followers.

ESPN’s insiders are guys who are often colloquially called jocks. While many of ESPN’s other viewers may play sports casually, a small fraction of the audience are men who have a significant history in competitive sports and continue to self-identify as competitive athletes. They’ve played varsity sports through high school and often competed at the college level as well. As adults, they are driven to compete, and to the extent that they’re able, they play in very competitive amateur leagues. Insiders see themselves as athletes and love to watch their fellow athletes perform. Whereas followers thrive on hanging out on the periphery of professional sport, assisted and encouraged by ESPN, insiders live within sport and watch sports as fellow athletes, not as spectators.

While other fans routinely miss most of their team’s games, insiders take pains to avoid missing any action. Because it takes a huge commitment to experience sport through games alone, most fans bank on highlights and news media to keep up. But since insiders understand themselves as players, not spectators, they must be there for the team, night in and night out. One man I interviewed showed the extent of his commitment:

Watching sporting events in this participatory style is a highly organized and ultimately exhausting activity. Watching requires advance preparation and concentration, so insiders watch mostly at home. They don’t watch games in bars, because they want to control their viewing environment. Because insiders organize their lives around game broadcasts, work, family, friends, and lovers must adapt, or they are relegated to the sidelines. During the game, insiders become so absorbed in the contests that they lose track of time and then find it difficult to forget the game once it’s over. They agonize over losses (what could we, the team, have done better?) and dissect wins to glean tendencies that can be applied in the next game.

Insiders voraciously gather fine-grained statistical and biographical information to enrich their game experiences. They track the entire league and all players to develop nuanced insights. Most use the Internet to go to team Web sites and other specialized resources. Many read sports books and specialty magazines to get inside the head of the players and coaches. Insiders expend so much effort in their spectating—the tracking of personnel moves in the off-season can be nearly as engrossing as league play—that they usually follow only one or two sports.

Just like the athletes themselves, insiders prepare for games and experience pregame jitters. With his brother and other friends, Justin, a Buffalo Bills fan who lives in Los Angeles, has developed a special ritual even though they are thousands of miles away from Buffalo. They have a closet stuffed full of Bills paraphernalia. On game day, they empty the closet, decorate the apartment so that it looks as if there is a party going on. Then they “prepare” for the game, meticulously reviewing detailed player-byplayer information. They listen to a cable radio broadcast of the local Buffalo sports station to imbibe the home stadium atmosphere so that they can imaginatively transport themselves to the parking lot outside the stadium, where they used to tailgate as kids.

Similarly, George has a Los Angeles Lakers shrine next to his television, which is shrouded by a Lakers jersey given to him by the team’s owner. Precisely thirty minutes before the start of the game, George removes the shroud and goes through a preparation sequence that he would not divulge to me. During the game, he sets up his notebook computer beside his television so that he can carefully track charts that illustrate the other team’s shooting patterns, much as a coach would do.

When watching games with others, an insider prefers to watch with fellow insiders because they’ll have the motivation and knowledge to participate properly. An insider will ban friends and family members, even though they’re sports fans, if they haven’t developed a fine enough appreciation for the game and background knowledge. The non-insiders’ ill-conceived comments will ruin the insider’s suspension of disbelief, dispelling his imaginative leap from living room sofa onto the players’ bench.

Like their fellow athletes, insiders are singularly concerned with achievement and winning. And so they assign moral value to personality traits that correlate with winning. One of the toughest challenges for an insider is to continue to root for a home team when it fails to meet his achievement standards. Insiders understand professional sports as the ultimate proving ground: It’s the place you go to compete, over and over, to show that you have what it takes to win against the best. George summarized this attitude:

Some insiders transfer this same intensity to business in their professional lives ; others remain fixated solely on sport.

Insiders work extra hard at their mode of watching sports to build a boundary between themselves and mere spectators. They respect other cognoscenti who live for the subtle details that separate winning from mediocrity, and they dismiss the more casual rah-rah fans, who root for teams without understanding the game’s intricacies.

Brand Loyalty as Institutional Legitimacy. Insiders watch ESPN more than most followers do. But, significantly, they don’t value the channel nearly as much. Because insiders are game devotees who demand unmediated interaction with players, coaches, and games, the network cannot serve as a game substitute. Rather, ESPN is a good forum to appreciate the outstanding play of some of the best athletes in the game and one of many information sources that insiders rely on. They watch ESPN, but usually do so instrumentally, to gather information, rather than commune with the pure-athlete ethos. In other words, insiders view ESPN as a news program, just as it’s billed.

Nor does this group look to ESPN to make sense of sport or to spin sport into myth. Rather, insiders respect ESPN reporters as fellow travelers who share their belief in the centrality of sport in life. They emphatically reject ESPN’s guru role. Because they are self-provisioners in building the context and knowledge they need to experience sports, insiders find it a bit insulting that someone might think that they would need ESPN in this way. Insiders see ESPN as a crutch for mere spectators, consumers of sport who aren’t devoted to the life of sport as they are.

To perhaps stretch a metaphor, insiders act like Protestants, asserting a direct and personal relationship with their god. They create myth experiences for themselves through their extraordinary dedication to continually updating massive amounts of facts, figures, and personal tidbits about sport and to continual interactions with teams, games, and athletes through watching games.

To insiders, ESPN seems like a theocracy, like the Catholic Church; the network asserts that the pure sport myth can only be accessed through the channel. They refuse to grant ESPN this standard-bearer role. Insiders aren’t particularly enamored by ESPN, partly because the channel makes spectating too easy: ESPN has appropriated their nuanced and intensively engaged mode of consuming sports and repackaged it for less committed fans.

Populist worlds always have insiders: people who either inhabit the populist world or at least hang out on its periphery. For Harley-Davidson, it was the outlaw bikers and their hangers-on; for Volkswagen, it was the indie artists and their fellow bohemians who lived in gentrifying urban areas and gravitated to underground arts events. For Apple, it was the cyberpunks and commercial arts technicians who relied on Apple for their creative careers, and for Mountain Dew, it was the extreme-sports enthusiasts.

Because of their direct and intimate relationship with the populist world, insiders strongly resist its commercialization. They detest parasitic brands that treat the populist world as a semiotic mother lode to be mined. Insiders see themselves as fellow participants, rather than as consumers. They have a legitimate claim to the populist world. People who aren’t willing to make the same commitment and, therefore, who rely on others (brands, critics, other insiders) to mediate their experiences—do not.

Because they have legitimate authority to speak for the populist world, insiders can bestow or rescind the brand’s authenticity—its position as a credible actor speaking from within the populist world. Astute marketers of icons, including all the brands studied here, work to assure that insiders are at least tolerant of, if not fully supportive of, the brand’s claims on the populist world.

If the brand is extremely persuasive in its populist mythmaking, insiders will adopt the brand to enhance their own identity projects. In this case, the icon becomes all the more valued in the eyes of its other constituencies. Conversely, if insiders trash the brand’s claims—berating the brand for selling out or because its actions reveal ignorance—the brand loses considerable credibility. Depending on the size and authority of the insiders, they can destroy the icon when they withdraw their approval.⁴

We can now see why it’s so critical for iconic brands to use literacy and fidelity to establish an authentic position in the populist world. If they don’t, insiders will quickly turn on the brand as a traitor. On the other hand, when iconic brands are especially good in their populist expressions, they become recognized as a contributor to that world and insiders not only allow the brand inside, but also further legitimize it by becoming advocates. Apple and Nike are prime examples. The primary role of insiders is not to generate revenue but to bestow legitimacy. Insiders act as opinion leaders, positioned to make authoritative judgments as to whether the brand really has populist chops or is a mere dabbler faking it to make a buck.

Feeders: Cultural Parasites

Feeders are those customers of the iconic brand—often the majority—who thrive vicariously on the identity value that icons produce for their followers and (sometimes) insiders. Feeders have only a superficial connection to the values propagated by the icon through its myth. Attracted to the status and social ties that the brand produces, they use the brand as a vehicle to build social solidarity with friends and colleagues, as an interaction lubricant, and as a status symbol. If enough people register deeply with a brand’s myth, their passionate use of the brand creates a magnet effect on others, who become the brand’s feeders.

ESPN’s feeders are people who are colloquially termed fair-weather fans: promiscuous fans who jump on the bandwagon of any winning team, accomplished athlete, or celebrated contest. They engage in opportunistic rooting—dedicating themselves to teams or athletes when either do well. For feeders, the pleasures of watching and talking spectator sports are shaped by their friends and, particularly, by the media. When friends’ and colleagues’ interest in a team heightens, they’ll join in. Similarly, when the media constructs a player as a star, they will follow. Feeders don’t follow teams or players; they follow trends. They take their cues from more informed fans and from the most respected media, especially ESPN. They’re on the lookout for teams and players that are receiving particular admiration in the media and quickly orient their attention and affections in that direction.

Feeders make little attempt to build a long-term relationship with the home team or any other or to seek out contextual information to enhance their game viewing. But when a local team is playing well or an athlete’s quest to break a record is drawing tremendous attention, feeders quickly absorb this passionate interest, as if by osmosis, and become highly involved fans, following closely and whooping and shouting as much as anyone else. Without this social context to create enthusiasm, feeders find little intrinsic pleasure in spectating. During seasons without a local winner, feeders rarely watch games, although they regularly watch championship matches.

Feeders understand that sport is the central pipeline for masculine mythmaking in everyday life. On a day-to-day basis, then, feeders take an instrumental approach, looking for the quick gloss that allows them to converse with friends and fellow workers as one of the guys.

Brand Loyalty: The Identity Magnet Effect. Feeders are heavy users of ESPN, but watch in an entirely different way and for different reasons. This group watches ESPN to watch sports. For them, ESPN is simply more enjoyable than most games because the program offers such an efficient distillation of what’s worth seeing. Feeders view ESPN’s capsule summaries of games as a fine substitute for the game itself, unless the game is “important.” ESPN separates the wheat from the chaff. For feeders, games lack easily digestible interpretations that wrap the story into regurgitated video bites and catchphrases. Feeders consider ESPN the Mecca of men they perceive as hard-core sports fans (followers and insiders). As a result, feeders watch plenty of ESPN because they feel the need to be tapped into the network to garner legitimacy as a sports fan. The group nevertheless has little emotional attachment to the program through its journalists. Feeders take advantage of ESPN’s high credibility among more dedicated fans and use it as a shortcut of sorts to becoming a fan. ESPN provides them with an efficient way to prep for socializing with their friends and colleagues. It represents what being a sports fan is about, providing feeders with language and attitude, which they are happy to pilfer and mimic. For them, ESPN condenses the world of sports into a usable form: a pocketful of catchphrases, a juvenile swagger, and a macho sense of humor.

Feeders are cultural parasites, feeding off the identity value that the brand delivers to followers. They aren’t nearly as committed to the brand’s myth as followers. Rather, the extraordinary devotion of followers and the credibility bestowed on the brand by insiders together create an easily accessible and effective identity currency that sustains feeders. Feeders don’t imbibe much in the myth experience, but instead feed off the experiences of others to construct an identity for themselves. Feeders want to be part of the gang and use the brand as a shorthand currency to do so.

In the mind-share model, brand owners grow their brands by adding product designs that can fit under the brand’s associations and by stretching the brand communications to appeal to a wider set of customers. Iconic brands don’t work this way. They operate as identity magnets, delivering myths that are precisely focused to address an acute contradiction in society. If the myth resonates, the brand accumulates followers. And the passion and devotion unleashed among the followers (and sometimes insiders) acts like a magnet, pulling in a mass constituency of feeders.

The most effective way to expand the market power of an identity brand is to enhance the devotion of the core customers situated at the brand’s nucleus. The more successfully a brand performs myths that feed the desires of the followers at its nucleus, the more customers in total the brand will attract.