Eighth Inning – Building an Idea Culture

Most of our ideas come from the mindset of whatever's normal do the exact opposite. Most companies focus on This is the normal way of doing things. This is what our customers are used to. Well that's not remarkable. Normal gets normal results. So for us we started questioning everything and we create a normal list and a remarkable list. And so give you the example, we started thinking about our voice mails at the ballpark. Everyone has a voice mail. Normal voice mail make it remarkable. Most voice mails are listen closely as our menu options have changed. I guess menu options are changing all over the world every single day. Everyone hears that. That's normal. We said let's not do that. So we start side to have a little bit of fun and one of the famous songs Havana. We turned it into Savannah, You've reached the sub in bananas. No. No. No. People are like, is this really the voicemail? But we kept taking it to the next level. Then we said alright. What about our hold music? Know most people have hold music. We said can we do something that's a little fun. So we played with the banana theme even more and now our hold music is ring ring ring ring ring ring ring banana phone. And we have people call us every couple weeks and say, can you please put me on hold? You wanna be put on hold? That's crazy, but they wanna hear the different types of experience. So you can keep going with that. Are your business cards? Are they normal? Is your email signature normal? Our business cards are business card baseball cards. Every single touch point you can say is this different? Is this unique? Will our fans or customers talk about it? And it's the simplest things. Think about the language on your invoice Think about your contracts. Are they like every other contract? At our ballpark, we have pregame announcements. Every game every ballpark in the country has pregame announcements please watch for throwing and battered balls. Our merchandise stand is here. We're serving this in concessions. Boring. So we said let's make it fun. One of our interns that I can sing I go perfect. Do you want to sing the pregame announcements? She said yes. So she came up with us famous song to Ariana Grande's song and would sing on the field in front of the fans and go, smoking is prohibited inside Grayson Stadium. So please take it outside. There's a place in the front to smoke if you Thank you for all your cooperation on. And people are like, thank you. It's the weird but it's remarkable. We don't believe in following the rules like everyone else. And so, don't break the rules, make the rules. And with a lot of our ideas, it's really relooking at the rules of not only the game, how you watch the game, how you experience a game, how you break the rules of what the players are doing on a given day. When you come to a baseball game, the players are supposed to play. We break the rules. The players dance. They go in the crowd. They do conga lines. They're interacting with the fans. That's not how it's supposed to be. And so we constantly ask those questions because that becomes memorable and that becomes remarkable. So whatever industry you're in, don't just think following how everyone else is doing it. How can you break the rules? Look at those things that are normal, the typicals, the standards, and do the exact opposite. That's been a mentality that we followed since we started It's the only way to get attention and to stand out. If you go through your experience right now, if you want to come up with the greatest ideas, think of one of the normal things and what would be the exact opposite. Don't think too small. Think big. Think crazy and think fun because that's where they'll get your fans talking.