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There is a wonderful book entitled The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell which discusses how little things can make a big difference in your life. It’s a book about change.
In particular, it’s a book that presents a new way of understanding why change so often happens as quickly and as unexpectedly as it does. You’re on the brink of something big and that little extra change of fortune or slice of luck tips things in your favour and success quickly follows.
For example, how does a novel written by an unknown author end up as national bestseller?
How did a pimply skinny kid from Stratford Ontario become the world wide phenomenon that is Justin Bieber?
How did Matt McKay go from being a run of the mill A-League player to a first choice Socceroo? What was the tipping point?
I think the answer to all those questions is the same. It’s that ideas and behaviour and messages and products sometimes behave just like social epidemics, flavour of the month popularity.
The Tipping Point is an examination of the social epidemics that surround us, how they are formed and what makes them become so popular.
The opposite effect is The Saturation Point.
We have all experienced the saturation point. In a work place people are repeatedly told how important some task is, yet somehow they forget to do it or even deliberately don’t do it.
Why is that?
Football coaches yell all the time during games. In their mind, they think they are helping the players on the field, but sometimes in reality, the players are ignoring them (or even worse, are doing the opposite) because they’ve hit the saturation point.
Advertising is a big one for saturation points. There is a fine line between showcasing a product till it reaches the tipping point and going too far and reaching the saturation point.
The person who is about to cross the saturation point would not necessarily know they are reaching it and starting to turn customers away, often not realising it till it is too late.
Once you have crossed the saturation point, it’s extremely difficult to come back to the tipping point again.
The AFL season has kicked off for 2011 and Sydney is not really noted for taking too much interest, but this hasn’t stopped the AFL strongly promoting their game, as they do.
The AFL has been very vocal lately. Andrew Demetriou has often told Australia that he will not accept second best and has set the AFL on yet another expansion path with 2 new Australian Rules teams to be introduced over the next two years.
Two very high profile rugby league players were bought by the AFL to win over the rugby league fans of NSW and Queensland and to be a part of their new AFL revolution.
Record amounts of money have also been spent trying to entice young New South Wales and Queensland children to play AusKick, the junior version of AFL.
The GWS Giants and Kevin Sheedy have been making a whole lot of noise about their team, their players, their new ground, but the team doesn’t even enter the AFL competition till 2012.
The AFL seem to be everywhere and always in the news. Radio, television, newspapers, all sorts of advertising for AFL.
They are even now getting into the weekend magazines, TV and chat shows. Case in point a very lengthy piece on Andrew Demetriou in this week’s Sydney Morning Herald’s Good Weekend. The little Aussie battler who comes good and is now the “goliath of Australian sport”.
No shortage of AFL programs on Sydney TV either. Back to back AFL programs – The Barassi Story and the documentary about Palestinians and Israelis playing a game of AFL.
So now the opening game of the 2011 AFL season kicked off last night with an attendance of 60,650. That’s a pretty good crowd for most sports competitions, but because the AFL has set its sights so high and based on previous season openers, it was in fact a very disappointing turn out.
86,972 AFL followers watched the same two teams open the season in 2009 – that’s a 31% drop in opening game attendance. Sure it’s only the first game of the season, but it’s certain to be something the AFL commissioners would be concerned about.
Has AFL reached the saturation point?
Seems as though the membership numbers for the Swans, and for that matter the Brisbane Lions too, are pretty low and well below their forecasts.
Sydney Swans CEO Andrew Ireland and Brisbane Lions CEO Michael Bowers have both come out in the press saying that they are in for a tough few seasons with the introduction of the GWS Giants and the GC Suns. Ireland had even commented that Sydney didn’t need a second AFL team just yet.
So, as we head into yet another AFL season in 2011 (is it their 160th) and after the relatively low MCG attendance for the first game of the season, is the game of AFL in 2011 at the Tipping Point or at the Saturation Point?
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