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 Hockey Gets a
Reality Check
A professional hockey team watches its customers in their native habitat, gaining valuable insights that help to rebuild post-strike game attendance by a cool 11 percent.
 When the Washington Capitals hockey team needed to bolster attendance, it used a strategy that was more Margaret Mead than marketing.
After National Hockey League (NHL) players went on strike and cancelled the entire 2004-2005 season, the NHL lost followers faster than a goalie does teeth. Fan loyalty, consequently, sank a near-disastrous 20 percent, according to a study by Brand Keys Inc., a New York-based market-research company.
In cities such as Montréal and Detroit, where the game is as intrinsic to their cultural identity as chess is in Russia, fans could be wooed back. But it was something else altogether for the Capitals, who never ranked higher in NHL fan loyalty than 10th out of the league’s 30 teams, per Brand Keys’ annual Sports Loyalty Index. With game attendance flagging as badly as its loyalty, the team called in Alexandria, VA-based RedPeg Marketing Inc.
Instead of examining fans’ views solely through the usual laboratory-sterile surveys, the Capitals and RedPeg decided to go native, the way the famed anthropologist Margaret Mead did when she wanted to understand the inner world of Samoan adolescents. “We decided to use the same technique with sports fans that social scientists do with foreign cultures,” says Mercedita Roxas-Murray, RedPeg’s vice president and director of client service. “We would study them firsthand in the field.”
 Calling it the Strategy Ethnographic Study, RedPeg convened two 15-member “immersion groups” in April, 2007, drafted from a pool of season-ticket holders, partial-season-ticket holders, and others who attended games sporadically. The groups’ demographic makeup reflected the Capitals’ fan base: All of them lived in the Washington DC-metro area, 74 percent were male, and 66 percent were between 18 and 45 years old. With three facilitators from RedPeg acting as emissaries to this exotic world of the wild sports fan, the Capitals invited each group to watch a game from a luxury box at the team’s home stadium, the Verizon Center in Washington’s Chinatown area.
Once set up in the suite and noshing on the free catered food, the facilitators relaxed the group with general hockey chitchat. Then, like a referee after he drops the puck to start a game, they sat back to watch the action on the rink — and in the suite — unfold. What they learned was as insightful as it was unexpected.
Looking for nonverbal cues and reactions to the game experience, the RedPeg staff learned what made fans tick — and what ticked them off. In general, the fans felt they received their money’s worth from the games, which at the time cost an average of $38 per ticket. Using the team’s Web site proved to be popular with the group, who considered it easy to navigate. Attendees even embraced the games themselves, despite the Capitals’ history of
jettisoning crowd-favorite but
expensive
players, and their
record of finishing at the
bottom of their conference in
the 2003-2004, 2005-2006,
and 2006-2007 seasons.
 Fans could endure their team’s failure with the grace of Chicago Cubs fans, but what made them want to send the team to the penalty box was the inability to forge a one-to-one connection with the players because, as one attendee said, “It makes a difference when you know who you are screaming for.” Staffers also witnessed the fans giving the cold shoulder to non-game entertainment.
It took the observers just two games to extract a flurry of suggestions on how to upgrade the game experience. At the top of their list were pre-game arena tours, post-game meet-and-greets with the athletes, and invitations to team events. They also suggested packages for birthdays, anniversaries, and other group events. Instead of the information-free entertainment when play stops, the customers wanted more highlights and replays. They also wanted more educational pieces about the sometimes-baffling rules of the game.
After RedPeg passed
the recommendations to
the Capitals (along with
an e-mail survey of 1,400 fans that reinforced the facilitators’ findings), attendance zoomed
up almost 11.5 percent from an average of 13,905 per game to 15,472. And this year, attendance has climbed even further to a per-game average of 18,018. It was a textbook example of the strategy that Mead herself said allowed you to “look and listen, record in astonishment and wonder that which one would not have been able to guess.”
 SAP Gives Attendees
a Badge of Honor
To get employees talking to each other after a merger, software maker SAP AG Business Objects uses enhanced name badges that track 143 percent more socializing than expected.
 “The single biggest problem in
communication,” said playwright George Bernard
Shaw, “is the illusion
that it has taken
place.” Nowhere is that
illusion more
deadly than in corporate mergers and acquisitions, where the communication between allying companies can break down faster than a General Motors SUV. Blended companies, like blended families, can often — and quickly — detonate into a mushroom cloud of bickering. So when Walldorf, Germany-based SAP bought Business Objects for almost $7 billion in 2008, both companies wanted to avoid any such domestic disturbance.
They reckoned the best place to start was Business Objects’ Product Group Kickoff, an annual event where the company gathered hundreds of its top managers worldwide for three and a half days to introduce new products and focus on the company’s strategy for the upcoming year. But this time they would use a high-tech strategy to help communicate key messages and help employees through the “getting to know you” stage of the merger.
After attending a knowledge management conference in November of 2007, Ryan Bazeley, SAP’s communications manager for mergers, acquisitions, and crisis, who also served in roughly the same position for Business Objects, overheard someone raving about the wonders of sociometric badges. A sort of name tag on steroids, sociometric badges can monitor and record activities such as who the bearers of the badges talk to, how long they chat, and, in some versions, actually measure the level of their interest in those interactions.
As Bazeley investigated the badges, he thought they could add to the de rigueur tech array of BlackBerries and iPhones attendees would wield at the $1.5 million conference. “We had something like 70 guests coming from SAP who were meeting their new Business Objects colleagues for the first time,” Bazeley says. “It was a great opportunity to start a good relationship between Business Objects and SAP.”
Bazeley contacted one of the makers of sociometric badges, Boston-based nTag Interactive Corp. (since bought out by Austin, TX-based Alliance Tech Inc.), to supply and program the techno-tags, which track where you move, just like a GPS device. Then they beam that data to a computer on site that in turn relays it to a monitor that displays how everyone wearing badges has been interacting.
The monitor might show Joe, for example, that he’s talked to only one person each from the marketing and legal departments’ upper management, when he wanted to make sure he talked to five people in each, as well as those in the purchasing department. Joe might also note that his interactions have been less than five minutes, while others are averaging 15- or 20-minute chats, and decide he’ll need to engage in longer conversations to make an impact. Aware of information that typically isn’t measured at events, Joe can now refocus his attention.
“The tags gather and display the information to attendees in a way that can help them improve their goals. It’s like biofeedback for behavior,” says Rick Borovoy, the former CTO of nTag. SAP Business Objects hoped using the tags could help modify the arch foe of large-scale interaction: Cliques that stick to each other and don’t mingle outside of their group.
 When the combined
companies launched the
Product Group Kickoff in
late January of 2008, each of
the 327 attendees received a
badge roughly the size of an
iPhone. Each badge featured
a 2-by-3-inch screen and four
buttons. Programmed with
their personalized agendas,
the badges allowed attendees
to interact wirelessly with
staffers, check session schedules and content, search for
entertainment venues, answer surveys, and more. For
example, immediately after
SAP Business Objects’ CEO’s
keynote address opening the
conference, the company
polled attendees to see if
they had understood the key
messages and retained them.
More than 95 percent of
respondents had, a measurement that allowed the
company to breathe easy,
since it knew its audience
had heard the messaging
loud and clear.
Event staff could also
make and announce
session changes
without
resorting to labor- and dollar-intensive physical signage. And after each of the event’s 10 sessions, ranging from product strategy to effective management, the event team surveyed attendees to gauge their popularity and effectiveness. Previously, the old Business Objects had tried measuring session results via e-mail follow-ups, but at best received a 20-percent response, Bazeley says.
While the data would help SAP custom-fit the sessions better next year, the tags’ real purpose was to foster relationships faster than a speed-dating
round-robin among the event’s three main groups: product development teams from SAP Business Objects; sales, marketing, and other personnel from SAP Business Objects; and guests from parent company SAP. At most events, the “off the grid interactions” — that is, what happens outside formal sessions and scheduled time — is as difficult to quantify as it is vital to understand. “What happens during the coffee breaks and the cocktail hours matters when they’re spending millions on developing new products,” Borovoy says. “That’s when they tell each other what they really think.”
Whether it was an informal
get-together between sessions,
breakouts in tents on the
beach, or at night while
guests mingled over
margaritas, the tags
tirelessly graphed
attendees’ social
interactions on a plasma-screen TV in the event hotel’s lobby that charted them like a massive map of traffic flow. Attendees could glimpse the readout of the overall pinballing interactions during the event, giving them a visual example of the three groups mixing and meshing. After the event, they each received e-mails detailing their specific interactions, giving them the behavioral ammunition to tweak their socializing strategies for next year’s conference.
The nTags also produce a “Mix-Ray” on the board. The Mix-Ray is a kind of social x-ray illustrating how the groups are — or aren’t — intermixing. “There’s no secret back room behind a two-way mirror where guys in white lab coats record everything you’re not doing,” Borovoy says. “The tags are meant to help groups modify behavior.”
 For example, SAP Business Objects held a contest where attendees racked up points for the number of their interactions, but with a higher
value placed on interactions outside their business group. With feedback from the board spurring them on, the winners walked home with iPods — and SAP went home with stellar results.
Even while avoiding what Bazeley refers to as “survey overkill,” SAP compiled a baseline of data on session likes and dislikes it can use for future events. A post-show poll showed an impressive 95 percent of attendees thought they would be able to pass on the key messages to their respective staffs. And with an initial goal of 7,000 interactions for the entire event, the final tally was closer to 17,000, exceeding the company’s target by almost 143 percent.
Monitoring what until now had been considered too intangible to measure opened up a whole new world for an event whose success relies on attendee interaction. “Once you get that data jones, there’s no going back,” Borovoy says. “You never want to go back to not knowing what’s going on at your event again.”
 Radio-Frequency
Recruiting Efforts
The United States Army uses RFID technology to track attendees’ behavior in its virtual-reality traveling exhibit
and reaches more than 100 percent of its recruiting goal.
 Almost 70 years ago, as
thousands of Nazi aircraft scorched the British isles with bombs and dueled to the death with the Royal Air Force, identifying friend from foe in the
chaos of aerial combat was like trying to tell one wasp from 100 others a mile away — at night. With their very existence on the line, the British raced to develop the life-saving radio frequency identification (RFID) technology. Once installed on their planes, RFID transmitters broadcast a signal back to radar stations that distinguished the good guys from the bad — and helped the allies target the German planes and send them to their fate.
Today, the military still uses RFID. But instead of identifying enemies, the United States Army now uses it to pinpoint prospects — because the threat this time isn’t a predator encroaching from without, but a danger eating away from within. In 2005, with an unpopular war draining any enthusiasm left over from 9/11 for enlisting, the Army fell short of its recruitment goal by 8 percent, the worst it has performed in almost 20 years. The usual barrage of television ads, print campaigns, and popular slogans were as ineffective on its main target — males 17 and older — as a BB gun on a Kevlar vest. “Once the technology had moved past TV to the Internet, a window to the people we were trying to reach closed for us,” says
Colonel Casey Wardynski,
who developed the video
game “America’s Army”
for the military in 2002.
In February 2007,
the military went
on the offensive
with the Virtual
Army Experience
(VAE), a 19,500-square-foot
interactive mobile exhibit.
(The VAE can also be down-sized to half that for smaller
venues.) The Army marched
the VAE to 39 events around the nation that year, aiming at functions that ran for two or more days and attracted its primary target market of males. It set up at car races, state fairs, and air shows, among other events. But beneath its nominal goal of attracting prospects with bombs and whistles, the VAE was on a kind of covert mission. “It was really a lab designed to do sophisticated measurement,” says Wardynski, who also conceived the VAE.
 At the MacDill Air Fest in Tampa, FL, for example, which typically draws 150,000 people over two days every June, young men lined up by the dozens to experience the VAE. Covered with branded Army material, the VAE’s three-story-high inflatable dome drew attendees in with its distinctive profile and three 6-by-9-foot LED screens that displayed adrenaline-rush glimpses of the live-action video game going on inside. While attendees eagerly stood captive for as long as two hours to enter the dome, the Army was able to launch its monitoring and measurement tactics. “That was when we started the reconnaissance,” Wardynski says.
Moments before the visitors entered the tent, Army personnel registered them, scanned their driver’s license photos, and took down their age and contact information. The Army also surveyed them for their interests and educational levels, feeding the data into a networked, GPS-enabled series of scanners, handheld computers, and RFID badges issued to every prospect that tracked each attendee’s movements in the 150-by-130-foot area. Supplied and programmed by Carrollton, TX-based Fish Software Inc., the ultra-wide-band RFID Tags — which were called “Blue Force Trackers” — distributed the data to the Army personnel waiting inside. The software crunched the survey data to automatically rank visitors by the likelihood of their enlisting, so staffers would know who to focus on the most.
With the RFID badges acting as a kind of surreptitious scout reporting on each attendee’s position and movements, VAE staffers already knew who those likely recruits were, along with the survey results of their interests and background. Whether attendees wandered into a trailer where they could play the “America’s Army” game, took part in a virtual-reality rescue mission, or checked out presentations on Army job opportunities from medicine to aviation, the RFID-based system tracked their every step. Army staff could see each individual depicted on their displays by icons whose color indicated the prospect’s likelihood of signing up.
The electronic trackers allowed Army staffers to create customized presentations for each participant, especially those participants it knew already had expressed a keen interest in enlisting. In addition, if a visitor watched a presentation on, for instance, medical opportunities in the Army, the system had the potential to automatically deliver messages on becoming a doctor, medic, or physician’s assistant, depending on how the prospect had answered his initial survey.
 The participants may have exited the VAE, but the VAE didn’t retreat from the visitors. After a typical stay of approximately 20 to 30 minutes, Army staff collected attendee’s badges and handed out copies of the “America’s Army” game to each departing visitor. Scanning the barcode on each game CD, the Army could monitor how much game traffic — and therefore potential interest in the military and its offerings — the VAE spurred. Adding yet another touchpoint, the Army sent a follow-up e-mail to each attendee expressing interest in the armed forces. But instead of the one-size-fits-all vague message you might expect for such a mass e-mailing, each communiqué addressed the recipient’s individual interests, and included a link to download pictures snapped of him during the virtual rescue mission.
At the close of each event, the Army relayed accumulated data to local recruiters. After two years and almost 100 events, nearly 150,000 attendees have gone through the VAE since it was launched in early 2007. Like most military campaigns, victory is never instant, but it can be sure.
By the end of 2008, the Army had exceeded its recruiting goals by one percent. There are many soldiers to credit, but the VAE’s monitoring strategy took a beachhead that no one else can claim. Or as Patrick Henry said more than 200 years ago, "The battle, sir, is not to the strong alone;
it is to the vigilant."e
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