The formula for building a brand presence can often feel shrouded in mystery, dependant on the whims of ever-changing trends. But here, Leif Stromnes, managing director, strategy and growth, DDB Australia, explains that resisting the urge to win over audiences with new and fresh content and instead sticking to familiarity often resonates better and wins the long game.
In 2011, Cricket Australia (CA) established the Big Bash League (BBL), the country’s newest T20 cricket competition. Eight teams from five capital cities contested BBL01 and the winners were the Sydney Sixers. The first season was a triumph and by season four (BBL04) the sport was in the top 10 global leagues for weekly attendance at more than 210,000 spectators and an average game crowd of more than 31,000.
Giddy with delight, and no doubt congratulating themselves on a job well done, CA decided to replicate the formula – and the Women’s Twenty20 Cup was duly launched. Women’s cricket, like most female participation sports, was on a massive growth trajectory, and CA was keen to get in on the action, especially as women’s cricket was generating excellent viewership and attendance numbers across its One Day and Test formats.
Despite the cricket being of an exceptional standard, and the competition attracting the world’s best female players, the women’s version was poorly supported, and television ratings were equally dismal.
Embarrassingly for CA, the better the men’s BBL performed, the worse the Women’s Twenty20 Cup seemed to go.
In 2015, after a very poor couple of seasons for the Women’s Twenty20 Cup, a decision was made to launch both competitions at the same time, with one crucial change – both the men’s and women’s leagues would be called the Big Bash League, and both competitions would feature the same eight teams, in the same colours, but with a male and female version.
This was a radical move. Up to this point, the women’s competition had its own identity and the teams had different colours, different geographical representation, and different names.
The men’s BBL comprised the Sixers, Thunder, Strikers, Heat, Hurricanes, Renegades, Stars, and Scorchers, and the women’s Twenty20 Cup the Meteors, Breakers, Fire, Scorpions, Roar, Spirit, and Fury. By collapsing the women’s cricket franchises into the men’s, CA was potentially throwing away hard-earned brand equity, and the small following that the women’s competition had painstakingly ground out.
The Women’s Big Bash League’s (WBBL) first season in 2015 has been described by ESPN as “One of 25 Moments That Changed Cricket Forever”.
In the very first game, the WBBL drew television viewership numbers that were comfortably bigger than the A-League, Australia’s premier men’s football competition.
Sensing something special was happening, the broadcaster, Network Ten, quickly moved the WBBL from OneHD (its secondary channel) to its flagship station, and immediately doubled the number of games it broadcast, with each team enjoying two games in prime time viewing slots.
WBBL went from being a supposed curtain raiser before the men’s games, to being part of the main event, and an equal contributor to the spectacle.
So successful was the launch season of WBBL, in the second season the leagues were jointly promoted and sold to the public as one composite competition, a first for Australian sport.
How did an underperforming competition, that had failed to attract any interest from spectators and broadcasters become an overnight sensation when the players and format were largely unchanged?
In a stroke of genius, CA had combined just the right amount of familiarity (the BBL brand and teams that people knew and loved), with just the right amount of freshness (female cricketers).
In its first iteration of Women’s Twenty20 cricket, CA, like so many other brands, had overstated the amount of disruption and newness that the public was looking for. In its enthusiasm to launch something bold and exciting, CA made the product 80 per cent fresh and 20 per cent familiar, while the public was far happier with a format that was 80 per cent familiar and 20 per cent fresh.
This is one of the reasons that so many brand innovations fail at launch. We forget that for distracted, busy, and time-compressed consumers, familiarity is comforting and far from breeding contempt, familiarity often breeds contentment.
