gordondaviesmoustache said:
Pige is right up to a point about the limited impact of the bile-ridden narrative of much of the media in this country upon City's plans to appeal to a wider audience, but I don't think that's the point for many City fans.
How the club is perceived in this country is important to many fans. There is an innate desire within nearly all supporters of all clubs to want to feel proud of their club. It's a little absurd if you think about it, because we have little or no power over how our clubs are run, but nonetheless the vast majority derive a sense of pride if their club is well supported, plays in the right way or if there's a good team spirit in the squad, for example. The same goes for how 'big' people's club they support is. To deride the club of someone else as 'small' or 'small time' for that matter is used as a weapon of choice in the game of footballing one-upmanship. It's nuts that it gets to people if you stop and think about it. Why should your club being perceived as smaller than you personally consider it, be a source of anything other than a shrug of the shoulders, rather than provoking a response like quoting attendance figures from fifteen years ago, for example. It shouldn't matter, but it does.
Wanting to protect and defend something we care about is a natural human instinct and for most football supporters that extends to the club they support. When people in the press, who purport to be professionals, write lies about our club, or don't report in a balanced, even handed way, or comment upon the club in a sneering, disrespectful way then for many of us, the responses you see on here are a natural reaction to that, myself included.
If I meet someone in a pub and they start bad mouthing City to me, then I usually disabuse them of whatever misconceptions they've got in fairly short order. I cannot respond in a similar way to the likes of Rob Beasley, not least because he hasn't engaged with me directly. On that basis it is entirely natural for me, and others, to express our disquiet about him and what he's said on a football forum. It's merely football supporters doing what comes naturally.
It's tribal. That's why we feel protective of our club, thats why take a pride in it's achievements and it's why we feel better about ourselves when we win. Did your mortgage rate come down when we won the league? Me neither. But I still felt fucking fantastic for weeks afterwards.
Where I seriously part company with pidge is his dismissal of the importance of brand management and the impact in commercial terms of negative publicity over a prolonged period.
We all know what the butterfly effect is. In terms of multinational brand management the way to prevent the butterfly effect from taking hold to the point where it harms your brand is to stop the butterfly from flapping it's wings. That is why big companies try to micro-manage their brand image to the Nth degree.
Stepping away from football, the biggest libel trial in English legal history was a case brought by McDonalds against some protesters who had been handing out leaflets outside McDonalds in Bristol or somewhere. The general tenor of the leaflets was 'big macs are shit in nutritional terms'. The trial of McDonalds libel claim took over a year. They poured millions and millions and millions into the budget, calling expert nutritionists from over the world to deal with the fat content and the freshness of the salad. They had no chance of recovering any money from the publishers of the leaflet (who handed out a few hundred leaflets maybe) but that wasn't why they brought the claim. They did so in order to stomp on anybody else who might have been thinking about bad-mouthing them - harming the brand. They did so in full knowledge that they would be seen as the Bad Guy in this David v Goliath legal case, but they calculated the harm to their brand was much greater if they did nothing. And They didn't just protect their brand, they used a sledgehammer to crack a nut in doing so.
On pidge's analysis, they should have said to themselves 'who cares what some bearded **** who wears socks with his sandals says in some shit leaflet he hands out on a wet Saturday morning in Bristol. We're McDonald's, we have an outlet within 15 minutes drive time of 95% of the country.'
They didn't. They went to extraordinary lengths to protect their brand image, and almost any other big company would have adopted more or less the same strategy.
The point is, brand image matters. You don't get rust from one drop of rain falling on your bike, you get it from it raining all the time. Every click on a negative article about city is like another drop of rain. The effect is cumulative, and it's damaging. Every major commercial organisation in the world knows this. That's why we should worry about it.
