Was KM on to something when she sought to put supporters into one of the categories of business?
She compared us to customers and suggested we should behave in a way that recognised this was the correct relationship for us to have with the club (or ‘business’). We fundamentally reject this as our role. A supporter makes a lifelong, usually involuntary, emotional commitment to a single entity; that level of commitment does not fit into the boundaries set by the role of being a customer. That we will not fit into this role, but instead “have a sense of ownership” of the club strikes KM as “weird”. To be fair, it is weird. After all, who can explain how this devotion comes about and remains? Weird maybe, but the sense of ownership is nevertheless real. Supporters are, of course, not (normally) owners of a football club in the legal sense, but they are the owners in an emotional or moral sense.
All this suggests that although equating supporters with customers misunderstands what a supporter is, there is another business analogy that gets closer to the real nature of a supporter: a shareholder. Of course we are not literally shareholders – RD is the shareholder – but we can be thought of as emotional shareholders. This is not just fanciful. The validity of the analogy is that supporters share with legal shareholders a crucial power: both types of shareholder have in their hands the ability to support or reject management’s stewardship of their company. In the case of football supporters that power is not exercised through the votes that their shares give them (they usually have none), but through the power of their emotional commitment; our weirdness is our strength. We care enough to act and in Rick Everitt’s words, “we can make the club unmanageable”. If KM, and also RD, had thought of us as shareholders, they might have found that this analogy pointed to supporters being a group that had to be considered, communicated with openly and honestly, listened to, and generally simply respected. Like shareholders we have a stake in the ‘business’. We have found ourselves in a situation where the stewardship of that stake has been assumed by RD and KM who seem to have lost sight of the fact that we can withdraw our permission for them to continue in this role.
Maybe this is an historic moment – for CAFC certainly, but also, just possibly and in the much longer term, for football more generally. There is enormous tension between football as big business, which it most certainly is, and football as ‘belonging’ (in a non-financial sense) to the supporters. At present money dominates almost totally. If this exercise in benign regime change (I mean here that the change is benign not the regime!) achieves its objective, it just might be a small step towards a re-balancing of the powers. I like razil’s comment that “the fans must be involved in any future ownership, this is the only way we can stop this madness, in our club, in our game.”
I admire greatly all those who have led the way and have participated in whatever way they could.
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My mandate was two-fold:
i) to ensure a return for the shareholders, i.e. those who 'funded' me to actually handle the business.
ii) to provide an attractive, efficient and economic product for the buyers, i.e. the customers.
Achieving a healthy balance between these two aims was my core responsibility.
This is not rocket science and should be equally applicable to those running a football club.
I like many don't like KM but i have less issues over her Dublin foot in mouth incident than most here.
I've worked in the video game industry for getting on for 20 years, I've been to several events like the one in Dublin and when you speak to wider business groups and explain why your 'customers' are not like their 'customers' and share why people get so worked up over what essentially are home electronics & games they get utterly befuddled. The other industry's in attendance have customers who buy their product and might even be brand loyal, but the idea that they might send death threats if a favorite vacuum cleaner is changed or Andrex toilet paper drops puppies from it's packaging is totally 'weird' to them.
Now don't take that as me defending KM, what she said was hopelessly naive. Despite her audience being made up of other businesses to go on record of saying what she did knowing the existing feeling of unrest amongst the fan base, added to the fact that it was recorded and uploaded to youtube was beyond stupid. I doubt RD will be letting her do something like that in the future. Now had she have gone there and talked about how weird it was from her background seeing the way football 'customers' behave but how great it was to have such passionate fans the business team could have worked with to grow Charlton Athletic, we'd be (slightly) less inclined to use it as a stick to hit her with. Maybe?
It's almost like they need a Head of Communications...
Where football clubs differ than most corporate organisatons and other businesses is that they can rely on brand loyalty to an extreme degree to retain customers in the face of the delivery of appalling service/ product in comparison to available local competition.
Unfortunately for her, and of course us, they have served to erode the brand and simultaneously destroyed any feeling of loyalty (towards the ownership) amongst current supporters and the inadequate business model/ strategy espoused will fail to gain new support when far superior football is available elsewhere without brand loyalty or any usps to bring them in.
Knew she was clueless when she spoke about tapping into the South West London market at if she's running a branch of Mamas and Papa as opposed to a tribal, traditional and partisan part of our culture.
Clearly a business does need a little bit of TLC every once in a while, but it's a rule that I've, always, followed and I've never struggled for new clients (mainly from referrals), and I've never lost one.
However 'customer' is a reasonable analogy for those that attend matches only occasionally or opportunistically - I think it's fair to say that during the Premiership years we had as many 'customers' as 'fans' (and there was nothing wrong with that).
When I fancy taking my kids to a random local game in my area (Herts/Beds/Bucks), I would always choose say Wycombe over Luton because the 'customer experience' is so much better. I will never be a Wycombe fan but I might readily go and watch them a few times per season.
Moreover not only am I choosing between which matches to watch, I'm also considering whether I'd prefer to take them to a football match versus other leisure activities, including those that are completely free (a country walk for example). In this example, customer is absolutely the right analogy.
In another thread, somebody said that they spoke to KM on Saturday and asked her why she had not answered any of the three e-mails that he sent her. She looked unhappy about being spoken to and didn't answer.
If the club was a cinema and it had such little respect for its' customers, it would go out of business. KM should be pleased that we are not just customers. As stated above, the tribal nature of football means that people keep coming back even when they are treated with such disdain.
In response to T’s point about thinking of supporters as stakeholders, I chose the analogy of shareholders (even though we are stakeholders and not shareholders) because shareholders are the only stakeholders with the direct power to change management.
And in response to newyorkaddick, the people in the protests on Saturday were clearly in the ‘ardent fan’ category. If KM has failed to understand that the connection these people have with the club amounts to something far deeper than can be captured by the term ‘customer’, then it is unsurprising that she is facing such serious problems. And if RD has failed to learn from his experience at Standard Liege that it is important to take the trouble to communicate in person just what it is you’re trying to do, then he too is asking for the trouble he is getting. (He did, after all, recognise after the escapade of fans invading his office that he contributed to the problem through his poor communications.)
Being an analyst by trade, but not a marketing analyst, I wondered whether there was any common segmentation of customers. I found this interesting site.
http://www.managementstudyguide.com/types-of-customers.htm
It breaks down five types and the first seems a fairly decent fit, although it still doesn't capture the raw emotion involved in following a sports team.
"Loyal Customers- These types of customers are less in numbers but promote more sales and profit as compared to other customers as these are the ones which are completely satisfied. These customers revisit the organization over times hence it is crucial to interact and keep in touch with them on a regular basis and invest much time and effort with them. Loyal customers want individual attention and that demands polite and respectful responses from supplier."
It raises a bigger issue - does KM, or indeed anyone at the club, understand marketing. I suspect not. I know I don't, but I do know that if I have customers, I'd want someone around who knows how to market to them.
More importantly if the fans contribute a third of the income if they encourage half of those to walk away that's a sixth of the income which, on the basis that many will not come back it's a whole year's income every six years. As we know even the slightest bit TLC and fans will keep coming back for decades so you could equate the income to a return where the capital is (on a 5% roi) twenty times the value of their annual contribution. Suddenly we are talking about significant numbers - certainly big enough that Ms Miere shouldn't be deliberately trying to antagonise the supporters.