Skip to main content

De-icing A Great Brand

"Hawks Lead (the NHL) In Attendance."  Now there's a surprising headline.  Yes, I'm a Blackhawks' fan but I also like a good turnaround tale, especially one with a provisional happy ending.

The resurgent Hawks prove how quickly a brand can be resurrected from decades of callous mistreatment and outright stupidity.  Bad business decisions off the ice and bad player decisions on, haughty refusals to build a TV audience, disdain for a rich legacy...and yet fans never really left.  

Oh sure, they stopped buying tickets and attending games.  And they COULDN'T watch most games on TV even if they were so inclined.  But the loyalty fires ran deep, thankfully, and never went out entirely.  You can say the Hawks are lucky. They TRIED to drive loyalists away and were 'this' close to succeeding.  

What a difference a year makes.  Intelligence and passion are replacing old-school stupidity.  TV audiences are up 78%, players are once again household names and the United Center is filled to capacity.  Rockin'!

Maybe I'll see you there.  We'll cheer for another happy ending - on the scoreboard.  Against the Redwings.


Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Michael Porter On Health Care Reform

Michael Porter, writing in the New England Journal of Medicine, proposes "A Strategy For Health Care Reform - Toward A Value-Based System." His proposals are fundamental, lucid and right-on, meaning they're sure to be opposed by some parties to the debate, the so-called "Yes, but..." crowd. Most important, in my opinion, is this: "... electronic medical records will enable value improvement, but only if they support integrated care and outcome measurement. Simply automating current delivery practices will be a hugely expensive exercise in futility. Among our highest near-term priorities is to finalize and then continuously update health information technology (HIT) standards that include precise data definitions (for diagnoses and treatments, for example), an architecture for aggregating data for each patient over time and across providers, and protocols for seamless communication among systems. "Finally, consumers must become much mor
Post a Comment
Read more

Being Disrupted Ain't Fun. Deal With It.

Articles about disrupting healthcare, particularly those analogizing, say, Tesla's example with healthcare's current state, are frequently met with a chorus of (paraphrasing here) "Irrelevant! Cars are easy, healthcare is hard." You know, patients and doctors as examples of "information asymmetry" and all that. Well, let me ask you this: assuming you drive a car with a traditional internal combustion engine, how much do you know about the metallurgy in your car's engine block? I'll bet the answer is: virtually nothing. In fact it's probably less than you know about your own body's GI tract. Yet somehow, every day, us (allegedly) ignorant people buy and drive cars without help from a cadre of experts. Most of us do so and live happily ever after (at least until the warranty expires. Warranties...another thing healthcare could learn from Tesla.) Now, us free range dummies - impatient with information asymmetry - are storming healthcare
Post a Comment
Read more

My Take On Anthem-Cigna, Big Dumb Companies and the Executives Who Run Them

After last Friday's Appeals Court decision, Anthem's hostile takeover of, er, merger with Cigna has but a faint pulse. Good. Unplug the respirator. Cigna's figured it out but Anthem is like that late-late horror show where the corpse refuses to die. Meanwhile, 150 McKinsey consultants are on standby for post-merger "integration" support. I guess "no deal, no paycheck..." is powerfully motivating to keep the patient alive a while longer. In court, Anthem argued that assembling a $54 billion behemoth is a necessary precondition to sparking all manner of wondrous innovations and delivering $2.4 billion in efficiencies. The basic argument appears to be "We need to double in size to grow a brain. And just imagine all those savings translating directly into lower premiums for employers and consumers."  Stop. Read that paragraph again. Ignore the dubious "lower premiums" argument and focus on the deal's savings. $2.4 billion saved
Post a Comment
Read more