Ice Skating and NASCAR

I had a tick box moment this weekend.  Never been to an ice skating competition, so with the US Figure Skating Championships in Greensboro, I figured 'why not'.  Dragged my 8 year old son along too - probably the only major sporting event where we passed the concession stand and I was not pestered into buying a jersey, bobble head, pennant, or giant foam finger.  Somehow petite skirts and t-shirts proclaiming "US Figure Skating" doesn't hold much appeal - guess the playground street cred just isn't there among many boys.


So a few reflections on this event.  Let's face it:  in our 'agony of defeat' culture, we often tune in to watch these events not just to see the winners but also to see the disasters, spills, crashes.  Watch any sportscast showing highlights of a NASCAR event, and the formula is the same:  winner crossing line, burning rubber, and the inevitably fiery crash.  And ice skating was no exception:  after every competitor in the pairs and ice dancing came off the ice, the jumbo-tron in the center of the Coliseum displayed a quick snippet of the performance, always showing the section with the slip, miss, crash onto the ice.  So much so that my 8 year old often said "oh, that's gonna hurt tomorrow", much like he also says after watching the Steeler's James Harrison take out a receiver.


Now I'm not going to go off on the 'society revels in the violence' diatribe, and link it back to Roman times.  But it is interesting how the media - be it ESPN, the local sportscaster, or the operator of the Coliseum video - all seem to play to this desire to show what happens when things don't go right.  Why are we fascinated?  Is it  simply schadenfreud, which a German friend once translated as 'the pleasure one experiences watching your neighbor fall off his roof when installing a new satellite dish that trumps yours'.  (As the word is derived from the 18th century, I someone doubt his definition was the original intent.)  Or is it that in the quest for perfection, in the hours that these performers invest in attaining their peak at the right time, to fall reminds us that they are human?  That they're sort of like us.  Like hearing that Tiger Woods didn't break 80 in a round.  Or Federer and Nadal not making a Grand Slam finals.


It's clear that in the sound-bite marketing world in which we live, in which getting standout for a brand is not only challenging but highly temporary, marketers work hard to avoid 'the disaster' which generates negative publicity so quickly.  They do whatever it takes to avoid reminding the general public that companies are run by people - very human people - who occasionally make mistakes.  Yet when marketers realize that some aspects of displaying the humanity in their brand can be productive - witness the resurgence of Domino's Pizza when they acknowledged their crummy product - it offers an opportunity to increase the dimensionality of the brand's personality.  Am I suggesting they display warts and all about their inner workings of their company?  No, although in the transparent world in which we live, and with more companies pushing into the social media space as if it were a magic panacea for increasing sales, it's likely we'll see a lot more 'negative insights' come through.  


So steel yourselves for more frequent examples of the 'agony of defeat' from companies - and the need for more crisis management and issue positions.  And if the figure skating championships come to your area (San Jose, CA in 2012), check it out.  Tick the box.  And if you have an 8 year old boy who'd rather shoot aliens in a Star Wars game than watch waifs on ice, think about how much you've saved in concessions.