Schooling the NBA on lessons of the heart

It’s January 13, 2014, I’m standing on stage, looking out over a sea of front office folks representing all 30 teams of the National Basketball Association at our annual Sales and Marketing Conference for the 2014–2015 season. I had just recently joined the Golden State Warriors as VP of Marketing and Digital Experience — note we were not world champions yet, that would happen later that season. I had spent the previous six months convincing the Warriors that we had to shift our entire mindset from being a basketball company to becoming an entertainment company that happens to play basketball. We were planning to open a new arena and needed to broaden our conception of who we were. This shift was more than just conceptual, it would require a change in mindset and operations.

So, I’m on stage…not coming from sports but being warned of the “echo chamber” that often envelops sports, I launched into my self-declared purpose which was to help these basketball teams realize what business we were really in; that we were NOT in the business of basketball (an audible intake of breath ripples through the audience — security is now being summoned), but rather we are in the business of entertainment. Later, I would go further to suggest the “Why” we exist (à la Simon Sinek) was that we were in the business of improving peoples’ lives–but one step at a time.

It was during that presentation that I first expressed, or maybe pleaded for understanding, that every company that cares about their brand, is in the experience business; every touchpoint a business has with a customer, partner, or employee is defined by the experience of that touch. The compilation of these touchpoints is the ultimate expression of your brand. And, if experiences are made of emotions, then by the transitive property of…I guess, math equality, we are all really in the Emotional Transportation business. Connections to the heart matter.

Enter master storyteller Peter Guber. I had the pleasure of working with him daily throughout my four seasons with the Warriors. Peter is impressive; he has produced over 60 films including Batman, Rain Man, The Color Purple, Flashdance, you get it. He was Chairman and CEO of Sony Pictures Entertainment, Chairman and CEO of Polygram Entertainment, Co-Founder of Casablanca Record & Filmworks, and President of Columbia Pictures. He is an owner of the Warriors, Dodgers, and LAFC, and is an investor in sports and entertainment ventures. I don’t say all these things to impress you but rather to impress upon you that he is a force in the entertainment business (not to mention being an incredible mensch). Peter’s ability to simplify complicated yet powerful concepts down to a simple phrase is masterful. One morning sitting in my newly christened office, Peter shared with me his philosophy of “heart first, wallet second.” I wrote this simple phrase on my whiteboard so as to not forget it, and it remained there — in the same place — a constant reminder until my last day. It was a beacon, a north star, serving to guide us in what to do, and not to do. I used to always joke with my office neighbor, Brandon, who was head of ticket sales, that Brandon’s motto was “wallet first, wallet second”. He didn’t find this as humorous as I did. Even though it wasn’t really true, it helped me to reinforce to him the value of emotional connection in our marketing and experience creation. Brandon, by the way, is still a good friend, and now the President and COO of the Warriors.

“Heart first, wallet Second” means exactly what you might think. If you focus on connecting emotionally with your customer/fan/guest, you will increase the probability they will buy what you’re selling; and that connection (as long as it is maintained and reinforced) will continue to deliver wallet-share over the lifetime of the relationship. In other words, connect with your audience’s heart, and their feet and wallets will follow. A Journal of Advertising Research study involving 23,000 US consumers, 13 categories of goods and 240 Advertising messages concluded that emotions are twice as important as facts in the process by which people make buying decisions (JD Morris). That’s how the Golden State Warriors signed Kevin Durant. I give all the credit to the emotional intelligence of Steve Kerr, Bob Myers, and Stephen Curry. We knew exactly how KD needed to feel to drive the behavior we wanted — which was for him to be emotionally committed to the Warriors, leave OKC and come to OAK. It had everything to do with emotions and feelings, not numbers and stats.

“Although the mind may be part of your target, the heart is the bullseye.” - Peter Guber

The challenge, of course, is hitting the bullseye.

So, before I provide a way to reach the “bullseye,” let’s first understand why the oh-so-familiar phrase “think with your head, not your heart” is really impossible to do.

I’m not going to do a deep dive into the science of emotions, because there are folks, like Amy Kruse at Prime Movers Lab who have PhDs in this area. That said, it’s not that the study of emotions has caught us off guard; we’ve seen emotions moving to the center of dialogue for years.

I often think of a quote by J.P Morgan, “A man makes a decision for two reasons — the good reason and the real reason.” He’s right: the deeper reasons for our choices are the good, rational, and defensible ones. How many times have you made a decision quickly [emotionally], then found ways to rationally defend it [logically]. Dr. Ellen Langer, a professor of psychology at Harvard, is famous for saying “Don’t make the Right Decision; Make the Decision Right” — many decisions are made emotionally, then backfilled to make them “right” or feel right. French psychologist Claude Rapaille calls this the rational or “intellectual alibi.” Alibis give “rational” reasons for doing the things we do, which is how I ended up with a very expensive TV I didn’t need.

In fact, we now know that feelings happen before thought and happen with great speed. In fact, the prominent neuroscientist Joseph LeDoug believes “emotions can flood consciousness.” Or, more succinctly, emotion drives reason more than reason drives emotion. This makes sense since the rational brain literally grew out of the emotional brain and the emotional part of the brain is larger than the rational part. According to emotions expert, Dan Hill, “we aren’t supremely rational creatures like Mr. Spock or Data from Star Trek.” And is that surprising? We are still 99% genetically identical to chimpanzees (Conniff) and as much as two-thirds of the human brain has been “hardwired” to reflect what our early ancestors learned about survival (Pinker); marketers need to be reminded that we are really not far from our cave-dwelling ancestors. In fact, according to one of Ad Age’s most influential Person of the Century, William Bernbach, the “unchanged man, with his obsessive drive to survive, to be admired, to succeed, to love, and to take care of his own. [grunt]

Here’s the thing. I know emotions are messy and sometimes uncomfortable. I know it’s easier to crunch numbers than to process emotions. I know these emotional things can’t be quantified, segmented, and put into Excel as easily as numbers. And according to the brilliant management strategist, Peter Drucker, “What gets measured gets managed.” Side note: Mr. Drucker never actually said that. Not only do I believe that businesses often measure the wrong stats (a la Moneyball), but even more so this statement implies that everything important has to end up in a number. Trader Joe’s, for example, has Kaizen as one of the company’s seven core values. That means that everybody in the company owes everybody else a better job every day, every year in what they do. They don’t do budgeting.They just expect their stores to do a little bit better every year. In fact, Trader Joe’s VP of Marketing and Product, Matt Sloan states, “We don’t have access to your data at Trader Joe’s because we don’t have any data on you.” I highly recommend their 5 part podcast series “Inside Trader Joe’s,” for a deeper understanding of how they have been atypically successful. The Dutch home care organization Buurtzorg is another example. They achieve higher patient satisfaction at lower costs without measuring and managing for either, in any meaningful way.

I am more in the VF Ridgway camp where he says, in summary, from a paper titled “Dysfunctional Consequences of Performance Measurements,” that not everything that matters can be measured and not everything that we can measure matters. In fact, one of my heroes, quality guru W. Edwards Deming, went as far to put this 5th on his list of seven deadly management diseases. Now, I know there are ways to quantify emotions (Sensory Logic’s facial coding, Ekman’s Facial Action Coding System (FACS), AI-based emotion detection), but we have a ways to go considering I was actually told by a COO not too long ago, that emotional literacy is mystical.

“I believe that ‘emotion’ is where it’s at.” -Tom Peters

So, if we are all in the emotional transportation business and emotions are central and emotional buy-in is key for business results and nurturing a strong brand, how do we act upon this? One of the best ways to make sensory-emotional connections needed to win is through storytelling. Purposeful stories are trojan horses that contain information, ideas, emotional prompts, and value propositions you want to sneak inside the listener’s heart and mind. After all, stories that “work,” transport audiences emotionally. Stories can be everything from a headline that takes someone back to their childhood, an origin story that creates purpose, or a podcast that helps the fans connect emotionally with your brand. As Peter Guber says in his New York Times bestseller, Tell to Win, “business people are human beings who grew up listening to stories just like everyone else. So, in any business, as in show business, if you fail to transport your listener emotionally, you will lose your audience, lose your audience and your Trojan Horse can’t possibly deliver your intended called action.” Maybe I’ll go into detail about storytelling strategies in a future blog post.

Just remember that when you transport your audience emotionally, it must be authentic, genuine, and consistent. It’s powerful because the wallet will follow the heart, but if a customer’s heart gets broken, you’ll lose that wallet forever.