More Deplorable Ideological Twaddle

At least, that’s what Wendy Parker would have you believe. Besides her article on Pitch Invasion, she’s slagged me off on her twitter account, soccer news aggregator site, and even her Atlanta Soccer News site. The basic premise is the same, but it seems Wendy got increasingly worked up as she plotted, wrote, and then basked in the afterglow of the article that was largely written in response to me.

Twitter, 11:39AM Sep. 11:

I vigorously deplore this ideological twaddle. Women’s pro sports is a business, not a cause:

Pitch Invasion, morning of Sep. 15:

Yet there have been protests against veering away from the idea of women’s sports as a social cause. A heated response to Chicago Red Stars CEO Peter Wilt’s rather mild explanation of WPS philosophy on this point was drenched, typically, in dreary ideological twaddle:

Beyond the Touchline Sep. 15:

Calls on the fledgling Women’s Professional Soccer League to openly embrace feminist issues is deplorable ideological twaddle and oblivious to the reality that all women’s pro sports entities are struggling with their business models.

My guest post at Pitch Invasion, which devotes quite a bit of space to women’s soccer and the culture of the sport. I’m flattered to be invited to contribute.

Atlanta Soccer News Sep. 15:

Staying in business is job one for WPS. Yet there are women’s sports activists who believe that overtly feminist causes need to be incorporated in how the league, and its teams, market themselves.

Over at Pitch Invasion, I cannot emphasize enough how vigorously I deplore this ideological twaddle.

You get the idea. Parker’s appraisal has already gotten an endorsement from new Breakers GM Andy Crossley. Some of you might remember Crossley as the WPS executive who said "We need to get out of the ghetto of being a role model for girls." Stay classy, Andy.

So, it’s on like Donkey Kong. Or something. On the up side, this is the longest, most serious attempt at a rebuttal to my assertions. On the down side, I think Parker got blinded by all her deploring and didn’t make her case as effectively as she could have. Before I begin, I’m going to address a couple misconceptions Parker has:

1) A post-feminist society is not something feminists are aiming for. It’s brought up by feminist opponents as an excuse for no longer caring about issues affecting women’s rights (ok, that’s a bit of an editorialization).
2) A heated response? I thought I was rather rational. Sure, I was a little testy in my first piece on the topic, but Peter and I worked things out in the comments, it’s all good, yo.

All right, let’s get on with the twaddling. And remember, "twaddle" is silly or foolish writing, not something you do to yourself.



The Charge

I started out this line of articles ruminating on the color pink and now find myself accused of seeking to pull the whole WPS endeavor beneath the waves with "Take Back the Night" rallies and marketing to lesbians. Parker’s central contention is that because all professional sports leagues in America are struggling, women’s leagues in particular, that the focus of WPS needs to be on succeeding as a business, *not* getting involved in promoting worthy causes relevant to women, or mucking about in whatever it is girl-power means. Such an outlook is particularly important to Parker because of the stunning failure of WUSA, which she at least partly blames on that league being marketed as a cause:

“If their parents had brought them to games more often,” [Tom Stone, former Atlanta Beat coach] quipped, “all those little girls wouldn’t be crying today.”

The reasons for WUSA’s demise were attributable to a business model that didn’t work, even after tens of millions of dollars had been expended, executives were replaced, television deals reworked and star players accepted hefty pay cuts. Some have argued that the social message WUSA was trying to get across — with an overt, if benign, endorsement of “girl power” — turned off potential fans in other demographic groups. To hard-core sports lovers, here was another example of a women’s sports entity feeling the need to become a cause.

Parker now argues that "social enlightenment" doesn’t have promotional or business value; that advocates for feminism or women’s sports should content themselves with worrying whether the league will still be around in a couple years; and that the WPS bottom line is the only thing that matters.

I don’t think any of that is correct. Effective alignment of WPS promotional and charity efforts with worthwhile causes that are relevant to women are crucial to the long term success of the league and directly impact the bottom line. The death of WUSA left some misconceptions about what it means to promote WPS as a cause, how to employ issue advocacy as an effective promotional tool, and some seriously malformed ideas about how to address the athletic minded women and girls who form WPS’s core audience demographic.

Lessons from the Death of the WUSA

The death of the WUSA was perhaps the most stunning professional sports league failure since the NASL went under in the 1980s, even more so than the decline of open wheel racing. The league was born out of a tremendous groundswell of support emanating from the 1999 World Cup victory. That support won the league a lot of capital, but also wildly unrealistic expectations of what attendance and revenue would look like. Just about everyone agrees that the core reason WUSA went under was that it spent so much money so fast and could never hope to match that spending with revenue. Mia Hamm, in an article Parker linked to:

“I know with the WUSA, we acted a little bit bigger than we were. Hindsight is 20-20, but based on the infrastructure we had we could have used some of those resources (better) and not hired as many people as we did — taking it slowly and seeing how it went and then adding to our business structure.

“Having office space on Park Avenue, you’re talking some of the most expensive business space in the world. You have to be smarter about that.”

Time Magazine:

[WUSA], which folded in 2003, budgeted $40 million to finance its first five years of operation. It consumed $100 million in the first three.

That’s over four times the planned rate of expenditure. Had the league spent money at the rate it planned, it’s losses would have been about $9 million over three years, $6 million *less* than planned. To make matters worse, revenue projections were crippled by the failing economy in the wake of the tech bubble bursting, enron, and the 9/11 attacks. ESPN:

A primary annual sponsorship target of $20 million fell $15 million short [the last] season.

And I’m not even getting into the marketing missteps or the broadcasting boondoggle where WUSA moved its games to the Pax network and cut game viewership to less than 25% of what it was on TNT. So why, with an appalling, horrifyingly wretched bottom line based on unrealistic expectations, massive overspending, a dwarfed revenue model and poorly executed strategy, why does the ESPN article have a title like "Still a business, not a cause"? And why does Parker accuse cause-related marketing of driving away other demographics?

Because that’s how the WUSA attempted to save itself once it became clear the bottom line was totally messed up.

The article Marketing Professional Soccer in the United States: Lessons in Exchange Theory and Cause-Related Marketing by Richard Souhtall and Mark Nagel describes what happened:

As the league continued to be unprofitable, WUSA executives seemed convinced that [cause-related marketing] and strategic philanthropy, which have been used by non-profits to solidify already strong and developed relationships with for-profit corporations, would also work for the league. The WUSA had initially positioned itself as a strictly for-profit professional sport league and using exchange theory principles. Recognizing that it was not a viable, for-profit entity, the WUSA futilely attempted to switch tactics and utilize strategic philanthropy (LeClair & Ferrell, 2000). What the WUSA failed to fully grasp was that most prospective sponsors or fans did not perceive it as a charitable cause, but simply a fledgling league struggling to survive. For many casual or non-soccer fans the teams organized by the United States Soccer Association (such as the World Cup Champions) were the ones supporting the non-profit goal of enhancing the development of soccer and, more importantly, the overall development of youth participants. (“Building the future,” 2006). Since the league did not have strong fans or sponsors “psychic attachment,” typical of established “male” sport leagues such as the NFL and MLB enjoy, it did not possess the reservoir of good-will (coupled with history of revenue generation and broadcast reach) these “established” leagues have accumulated, it could not utilize strategic philanthropy to develop cooperative ventures with sponsors.

The problem was not that WUSA marketed itself as a social cause. Rather, the problem was that WUSA initially portrayed itself as a heavily capitalized, well-supported for-profit entity, only to put on the charity mask when it lit large portions of that capital on fire in a short period of time. The duplicitousness in that turnabout, and the existence of other organizations people more readily identified as carrying the non-profit banner for soccer, were at the core of why the message was not only ineffective at winning over new fans, but why it actively turned people away from the league.

That right there is what Peter Wilt has been talking about, and yeah, it was totally pathetic and sniveling. I understand why people wanted to kick WUSA to the curb. But promoting WPS as a social cause doesn’t have to be that way, and to throw away valid promotional techniques on the basis of that failure is woefully misguided. And since WPS has a much more realistic bottom line, appears to have hit its financial goals and has already partnered with grassroots soccer organizations, it has a much better chance of successfully aligning itself with positive social causes.

Cause-related Marketing and Strategic Philanthropy

Southall and Nagel sum up the two main ways that alignment would work:

Cause-related marketing is a strategic positioning and marketing tool that publicly associates a for-profit company with a nonprofit organization and a relevant social cause or issue. Such an association links the company and the company’s product(s) directly to a social cause or organization through the implementation of a strategic marketing plan while also raising money for the nonprofit entity, thus mutually benefiting both (Polonsky & Macdonald, 2000; Pringle & Thompson, 2001). American Express’1983 involvement in the restoration of the Statue of Liberty is an example of a cause-related marketing campaign. Generally, an organization prefers to support “causes” that are of interest to its target market. While there may be a philanthropic motive to cause-related marketing, the efforts of a cause-related marketing campaign tend to produce relatively short-term, product-related outcomes (LeClair & Ferrell, 2000).

Strategic philanthropy involves a long-term investment by a company in a cause that provides societal benefits while also enhancing the company’s reputation (Stotlar, 2001). Such a long-term investment may require a company to endure short-term business losses for the good of the cause and for the fulfillment of the organization’s social responsibilities and long-term gain. It requires support from top management and shareholders, and coordination of corporate giving and employee volunteer pro- grams with the overall corporate mission. This redefinition of philanthropy recognizes that while busi- nesses should be good corporate citizens, they must not forget their fundamental obligation to their shareholders and employees, and to the company’s profit-and-loss statement.

Pointy-heads will want to check out that Ferrell article, but be warned it’s only on archive.org at this point and has white text on a white background. You’ll need to copy it to a text editor and change the color to read it.

Like Wilt says, WPS already does cause-related marketing - Komen Foundation, Greenlaces, Cat Whitehill’s efforts, and more. So why not make it more visible, more coordinated, and more focused on WPS’s core demographic of athletic-minded women? And why not make the messages revolve around stronger, more adult-oriented issues? To me there doesn’t appear to be much down side to an effective campaign along those lines.

Strategic philanthropy should also work well, because the social benefits the league provides are so tangible to all of us. My contention is and always has been that WPS should actively promote its role in providing opportunities and role models for women, relative to Title IX and other grassroots groups. Never mind picking a cause and pouring money or time into it (although I think that’s a great idea), all Bend It Like Beckham did was show teenage girls using WUSA as a goal to break away from their traditional cultures and assert themselves as strong, sexually independent women, and the movie grossed $32 million in the United States.

The ultimate goal of these promotion strategies are to get men, women and children to come to games in part because it makes them feel good to be associated with a league that provides societal benefits. It doesn’t mean begging for money because the league spent it all, and it shouldn’t be the only promotion strategy. That doesn’t make anyone feel good. And nor should the negative way WPS views its core audience of athletic-minded women and girls.

Marketing to Women

Where this all comes together is in how the league markets itself to athletic women and girls. Despite being the strongest target demographic for WPS (as stated by the WPS director of communications), we contstantly hear the league downplaying that support. There’s this somewhat reasonable statement by commissioner Tonya Antonucci in the Time article linked above:

"The WUSA was more aspirational for young girls," says Antonucci, a former Yahoo! executive and Stanford soccer player who has worked on the league’s relaunch for more than four years. "What we’re doing is socially important, but it has to be broader than that."

And of course Wilt’s harsher view in the middle and Crossley out on the fringe. Then there’s Doug Logan, who was who-knows-where when he said this in reference to MLS:

When the MLS launched in 1996, a faction of team owners thought the key to success was to attract the nation’s soccer moms and their kids, said Logan, league commissioner until 1999.

"And nothing could be further from the truth," Logan said. "Team sports is tribal -- and, unfortunately, male. In its finest heyday on ESPN, on ESPN2, the audience (demographic) for the WNBA was 71-72 percent male.

"Women don’t turn television sets on to watch stuff except maybe gymnastics, swimming -- you know, on an Olympic year -- and skating. You can’t force something there that isn’t there."

So it’s become fashionable to crack on women and children as a reliable soccer audience. I don’t doubt that WPS will struggle to thrive by only marketing to that one demographic. I also think it has unique advantages to appeal across genders and age groups. But by downplaying that core fan base, the league risks slowly eroding it’s best area of support and repeating some of the worst WUSA marketing mistakes. Unlike Antonucci says, the problem wasn’t that the WUSA was aspirational to girls, it’s that they marketed it in the wrong way. Marketing researcher James Chung in the New York Times:

An inexperienced W.U.S.A. staff, Chung said, violated a cardinal rule of youth marketing: you do not advertise yourself to the age of your core audience, but to the age your core audience aspires to be.

In other words, if the league had played down "sugar and spice" wholesomeness campaigns meant to attract 8- to 12-year-olds, and sold the concept of the players as strong women, the W.U.S.A. could have kept the youth audience and also made itself relevant to a much wider group of adolescent girls and young women.

"If you speak solely to that ’tween’ audience of 8- to 12-year-olds," Chung said, "you almost guarantee the teenage audience will run away from you."

Hey, it’s that promoting-players-as-strong-women thing I was talking about in my first response to Wilt. How about that. And this is something Parker and I actually agree on:

I’m all for marketing the games played by adults to adults, and I think women’s soccer needs more bad girls like Solo. That was one of my chief complaints against WUSA’s marketing strategy. It was a shame that it was geared mostly to kids, given the individuals I enjoyed covering in Atlanta during those years.

Another thing Chung points out is that the WUSA was promoting itself to soccer moms when neither women nor sponsers were comfortable with that identity anymore. Right now, I think WPS is making a similar mistake by overly bending toward what it perceives will attract men to the league, and then slagging off the women and girls who are the ones driving the revenue WPS has coming in. Both show a fundamental misunderstanding of the female market.

One reason I’ve advocated conducting promotional campaigns around charitable or social causes that are relevant to women is that it is a very easy way to get back to understanding that core demographic. By developing a better understanding of that demographic and its relations to others in society, the league will grow and learn how to better cast other promotional messages that aren’t cause oriented or are targeted elsewhere. Right now I think WPS has a fundamental disconnect with that core audience. To thrive the league absolutely needs support from all genders, ethnic groups, and classes. But it will only trade one shaky financial ground for another if it doesn’t understand why its core audience comes to games or not.

As an aside, when Steve Jobs was asked in the mid-90s what he would do if he were put back in charge at Apple, he replied that he would milk the Mac for all it was worth and move on to the next big thing. When Jobs came back to Apple, he put that strategy to work - the Mac was always talked up, always tended to, always refreshed. And then when the iPod was the breakout product, the Mac business grew even more. But he never denigrated the Mac business to begin with.

It’s analogous to where WPS is right now. If the league doesn’t understand and effectively market to the core supporters, who are women and girls, and stop talking down about that demographic to the mainstream press, it will be hard to survive until it can break into the mainstream. And a great way to do that is cause-related marketing.

Fake Sigi out.