This year’s US Open had an audience growth problem, and ultimately…really bad strategy about it. During Naomi Osaka’s first-round match, the chair umpire asked a group in a courtside suite, filming themselves under bright lights, to sit down. Afterwards, the USTA put up new signage and messaged ticket and suite holders about ring lights and flash photography.
The tournament was working to bring in a bigger, younger, less traditional crowd, and it issued roughly 100 creator credentials this year (the USTA says the group at the Osaka match didn’t hold one). More people came. Then the loyal fans who consistently show up for the tournament started saying, loudly, that the event had drifted away from them.
When companies model what a new customer is worth, their growth plans can overlook what the new customer changes for others.
When different customers become incompatible
Plenty of brands serve customers who want opposite things and nobody minds. Annie Wilson, senior lecturer of marketing at the Wharton School and co-author of The Growth Dilemma, puts the line at interference. Two groups are merely different until one group’s presence keeps the other from getting what it came for, whether that’s the functional thing the product does, the identity it signals, or a clear sense of what the brand stands for.
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Scale is what usually moves a company across that line. A handful of loud fans is a nuisance. Enough of them and it becomes a different event. “As a traditional tennis fan, I might be able to tolerate some raucous behavior from fans who attend matches more for the party scene than the tennis,” Wilson says. “But if that party segment grows so large that its presence starts to impede my ability to enjoy the tennis, then we become incompatible.” Longtime customers hold the clearest picture of what the experience is supposed to be, so they notice the change first and feel it hardest.
What separation can and can’t fix when it comes to customer loyalty
Wilson sorts the problem into four kinds of conflict: functional, brand image, user identity, and ideological. Functional conflict usually responds to separation, like a different product or a different channel. Image and identity conflict sometimes do. Ideological conflict rarely does.
Bud Light is the case everyone remembers. Separation wouldn’t have helped, since the objection was to the brand speaking to another group at all. Most portfolio companies clear this bar without thinking about it. Someone who buys Gain for the smell doesn’t care that P&G also makes Tide. Match Group runs Tinder, Hinge, and BLK at once and nobody defects on learning it. Wilson’s counterexample is useful: a conservative-values ice cream under the Ben & Jerry’s umbrella would fail on contact, however separate the branding.