Bryan_Gattozzi

Nostalgia: Personal and Corporate Danger | August 11, 2009

Nostalgia is a damned dangerous thing.  The goal in any endeavor should be to feel current experience.  Not being compelled to feel is what angers a consumer after the crappy movie, the bland dinner, etc.  In response to losing emotional currency a habitual person lives in apparent safety: mouthing dialogue throughout the movie; eating the same supper.  Nothing sadder, I think, than a person who knows all the words to ConAir or even a marginally better movie like Love, Actually.  These people would rather have Subway than take the chance on trying offal.  What would happen if they enjoyed snapping the head off a crawfish, lighting their tongue with cayenne, slurping boil from its head, getting their fingers into the exoskeleton, pinching the tail, breathing in steam and smoothing out the palate with soft, miniature flesh?  Even little risks are worth taking.

For a company, punting on a successful marketing strategy is dangerous.  For an individual moving outside the comfortable can cause the trauma, or in extreme cases  euphobia: the fear of hearing good news, which is the opposite of old news.

The same is true with personal nostalgia.  In effort to make past memories present, one can lose the present–and more importantly the joy in anticipating the future.  This is true in relationships, friendships, and especially how businesses respond to their consumers.  Big corporations have to balance the consumer’s appetite for nostalgia with presenting a new, necessary message–one the consumer may not like.  These changes are needed in the information age because if the libertarian model of consumer-executives worked, companies would be run exclusively by a democratic board of its shareholders.

The CEO is more important now than ever–because painful, snap decisions must be made in industries that used to be somewhat recession proof, like professional sports, and we’d all be better off running our lives like an executive, firing our negative influences that keep us boxed-in and living like a negative Romantic, chasing the expensive, intangible past.

In inter-personal relationships, and sports, we’re all of the what-have-you-done-for-me-lately variety, and in no way is this selfish.  Our liberties have never been greater, in our employment, consumer or personal lives.  There may be another better option out there.  The grass may be greener on the other side.  The economy is forcing innovation, personal and professional, like we’ve never seen.  Marketing the self is essential–because your competition is taking web development classes, learning Chinese, catching social network fever.  The nostalgia of loving your old summer job spinning soft-serve is useless, unless you want to be serving twist cones to make ends meet.

This relates to professional sports, especially my boyhood love: the Cleveland Browns.  Sports franchises market toward the same nostalgia paradigm.  The Browns marketing model since 1999 has been to repeat the same old stories, sell fans throwback jerseys, to sell the feeling new glory days will begin tomorrow by obsessing on the past.  There is a crystal moment for every sports fan, a moment when the wonderful unpredictable occurs.  The Browns have been selling this moment for 22 years, and it’s time they quit.

It’s time to banish “The Dawgs” forever or put the thing on the helmet.  Teams market merchandise, in-game entertainment, and brand the franchise accordingly.  The individual, at some point, must realize when nostalgia disallows growth–or he / she perishes into sad routine–where the Browns have been for 20 years.  NFL Properties, or the Browns‘ marketing staff must realize the cash cow is milked dry.  Browns‘ fans fought for the team colors and records, which is fair, but both have been too complacent in accepting a faded dream–which never allows a person to become something better than what they were.  It’s no surprise the Browns are the only team with a monochrome helmet–they have no identity. They fear the fan backlash if they tweak anything.  Fear of your customer is no way to run a business.

WTAM afternoon drive host Mike Trivisonno is right in calling Browns Stadium’s east end zone the “Puppy Pound”–the “Dawg Pound” disappeared on January 11, 1987–two days after my 9th birthday.  Brian Brennan had just slipped under coverage to catch a Bernie Kosar bomb for a 20-13 lead.  The Browns were one defensive stop and 5:34 away from winning the 1986 AFC championship on their home-field.  “Pandemonium Palace” was going crazy–80,000 certain this was THE YEAR.    Mark Mosely walked out onto the painted dust and straight kicked a knuckleball the Broncos couldn’t return, leaving them 98 cold, pockmarked yards to tie the game.

If the Browns were really “The Dawgs” and its home-field advantage that important, what we know happened would not have happened.  I needed 20 years and a long stay outside the city to realize this: “The Dawgs” scared nobody.  No excuses.  The team wasn’t good enough.  Period.  No need to remember that–or get too worked up about it now.

What Browns fans latch onto would be akin to the New Orleans Saints primarily continuing to market their Dome Patrol quartet of linebackers from the late 1980’s: Pat Swilling, Ricky Jackson, Sam Mills (cut by the Browns–ouch), and Vaughn Johnson.  Rightly so, they’ve moved on to use in-game fan experience through: http://www.howdeepdoesyourfango.com/ a great multi-media site that provides fans with a vehicle for their own in-game entertainment–where the fan becomes the star, not some memory the fan is trying to reestablish, one that wasn’t that great to begin with.

This is the danger of nostalgia–to remember a time when things appeared great yet really weren’t.  Clevelanders say: Let’s get the auto industry kicking again.  Let’s get steel mills running.  Let’s bring back Kenny Lofton–the Indians need a speedy on-base guy–without realizing he priced himself out of MLB because of nostalgia–he wanted to be paid for the player he was.  Owners rightly called his bluff and went elsewhere–as mill investors and steel producers.

If a person’s expectation is for a team to provide the next great moment–for it to replicate nostalgia–entertainment sounds depressing.  The moments come once a generation, unless you root for Boston or New York.  But Saints fans at the site above have it figured out–sport is entertainment–it is about a person connecting with like-minded friends, enjoying a beer or two (not 23), going crazy during great times and making your own fun at worst.

The Cleveland Browns have hired coach Eric Mangini, who seems fairly disinterested about whom he pisses off, and have given him executive power, with the goal, I hope, to create memories instead of living off the crystal memory, that wasn’t that great by the way.  We lost, remember . . . it’s over . . .  let’s move on.  The decision to halt the Browns Legends Program is a smart step to focus on what really matters for this franchise–proving their own identity of the field.  Then the team will have something lasting to sell.