Wellington Sevens' slump shows need to back 'fans,' not whingers

It's often cited that business can learn from sport successes and while PR practitioner Mark Blackham  thinks that's not always true, he says there are useful lessons to be gleaned from the mistakes sports administrators make when faced with public relations problems.

 Mr Blackham nominates the precipitous decline in attendance at the Wellington Sevens as a prime example of such a ‘teachable moment.’

The reason for the falling ticket sales that have put the event’s future in a capital at risk is crystal clear as far as Mr Blackham is concerned – organisers were too quick to respond to “a moral panic” about drinking at the Sevens, when the vast majority of the crowds who flocked to it in its heyday were there precisely because of the alcohol-fuelled atmosphere.

“What they did was collaborate with the police and city officials who had no interest in the event being fun,” he says.

“The result was an event that was policed within an inch of its life and thus nobody really wanted to go back. That’s how they went about it: They didn’t listen to fans, they listened to people who weren’t fans.”

To put it in a clearer business context, Mr Blackham says, for “fans,” read “customers.”

And his primary point?

“Organisations and companies have got to draw the line at their customers. If your customers are happy, then they’re the ones you owe allegiance to; they’re the ones who are paying your wages and providing your income.

“If you go along with ‘the complainers,’ the state of the Sevens event signals that you could, in fact, destroy your own line of profit.”

Mr Blackham argues it was “far from clear that there was anything like a societal reaction against the Sevens. So I think you would draw the line in defending your customers if there was some sort of large-scale society reaction against it. That’s where you have to think about what you do to modify the behaviour.

“But there was nothing like that whatsoever – it was an absolute moral panic, with a few people who decided they didn’t like it.”

To mount a successful defence if your company is copping criticism in a similar situation, “the first thing is working out who the complainers are,” Mr Blackham says.

“There are always going to be people who dislike what you’re up to – businesses face this all the time – and these people, by and large, don’t matter too much.

“They’re not the ones who are likely to be your customers, so I think that perspective is important: understanding that you will never make everyone happy.”

The second thing to get to grips with, he says, is that the illusion that criticism in public is always the same as criticism by the public may be exacerbated by a “false consensus” that’s reached by listening to your peers – in the case of the Sevens organisers, “city officials, politicians, those people who were alarmed” – rather than your customers.

“The Sevens example shows that, if you care more about them than the people who are actually paying your wages, you can come a cropper.”