Hey!

Ease up on the ears

a little, will ya please?

     Where is it written that business and professional sports success must hinge no longer on performance, but on the tumult and hoopla that surrounds them?

     How did it ever get to be that attending a professional football, basketball, or baseball game meant giving up one’s sense of hearing for a week?

     I am nor referring to the yeas, boos, chants, whistles, claps, and songs of enthusiastic well-meaning fans. With or without cheerleaders, those natural outbursts of energetic support — together with the crack of a bat, the swoosh of a net, and the thud of a tackle — are the real true sounds of sports.

     I’m talking about the machine-generated, artificial bombardments of drum-banging, hand-clapping, bugle-blowing, spiral-buzzing racket that has absolutely nothing to do with the sport-at-hand, nor the performers, and which is a genuinely disruptive insult to our respective brains.

     No I’m not turning into a grouchy, out-of-touch, old guy. I am simply resentful of how noise has risen to the top of the consciousness disruption charts, and literally taken over what it was originally designed to merely support.  

     I was reminded of this again today as I went to see my favorite NY Mets play the Baltimore Orioles at Camden Yards. I’m not singling out any team or stadium here because it’s ALL of them; today was simply an example.

     And just like in business— some know-it-all marketing whiz-kids have literally commandeered every professional, semi-pro and college stadium and gymnasium, and forced each venue into becoming a catch-all of suffocating, obnoxious, insulting, decibel-threatening sound effects.

     How stupid is sports top management to have been sold on the idea that blasting noise (and even, but to a less annoying extent, music) through seat-and-building vibrating speaker systems will contribute to successful team status?

     In fact, it seems to me to be doing the reverse. I see many more fans staying home to watch sports on TV and not subjecting themselves to this deafening fun for the feeble-minded.  

     In business, educational and entertaining market-ing approaches seem universally preferable to those parts of the population that I’m exposed to, than the screaming in-your-face, sleazy fast-talk of car dealership advertising and many late night info-mercials. Yet the audio clutter continues.

     Greedy pro sports management convictions that noise sells . . . and that the way to an enthusiast’s heart and wallet is by prompting pounding headaches . . . is serving to set the stage for other businesses to follow suit. Does it all originate in Hollywood? Well, let’s see: how many movies can you name that haven’t wrapped their messages in earth-shattering sounds? (Oh, sorry, “Special audio effects.”)

     No matter what your business message is and no matter how you say it, when you surround it with too much noise, you will suffer the consequences of lost trust and lost credibility. People who really mean what they have to say don’t need to wrap it up in fireworks, sirens, explosions, and other deafening audio garbage.

     Just say it like it is.

If a certain sound is part of what’s being sold or sets a receptive stage, use it.

If not, don’t.

www.TWWsells.com or call 302.933.0116 or Hal@BusinessWorks.US  

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