Savannah Bananas: Brand Positioning Case Study

Let’s be honest: baseball is slow and boring. It should be impossible to position a struggling minor league team strategically, but don’t tell that to Jesse Cole.

He started the Savannah Bananas baseball team in 2016, made them Tik Tok famous, and scored an ESPN+ series.  In this bite-size breadown, we’ll cover exactly how he did it so you can steal his strategy…

💼 The Brand: The Savannah Bananas 

The Savannah Bananas are essentially baseball’s globetrotters, but Jesse Cole took it a step further. He reverse engineered the entire fan experience providing circus-like entertainment, free food, and an ad-free environment. 

💛 The Heart (Mission & Vision)

The mission of “Fans First. Entertain Always.” guides the Bananas in everything they do. If it doesn’t serve the fans or entertain, it doesn’t get to stay — which is why they decided to just create their own version of baseball with wildly different rules.

👤 The Head (Strategy & Positioning)

The Savannah Bananas are not your typical baseball team and they’re proud of it. They’ve positioned themselves as a “circus baseball team” providing a fun and somewhat outrageous experience for the entire family.

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✋ The Hands (Tactics):

The Bananas’ owner, Jesse Cole, has employed a variety of tactics to execute on his strategy of being a circus style baseball team that puts fans first… most of them involve asking, “What’s normal?” and then doing the exact opposite

• The pitchers sometimes throw using stilts. Because of videos like the one below, they now have a larger Tik Tok following than any MLB team.

• They have grandma cheerleaders called the Banana Nanas. Before this gig, these Nanas were dancing at local retirement homes.  

• Breakdancing during the middle of an inning. The video below went viral for obvious reasons.

• And just recently, Jesse Cole made news by turning down a $1M ticket order to prevent a ticket reseller from raising prices. Most “normal” minor league baseball team owner’s would’ve jumped at the offer — but he did the opposite.

How You Can Steal Their Strategy

• Establish a clear mission and vision for your brand that guides all decision making and ensures that everything serves the audience and provides entertainment. Even with $1M on the line, Jesse Cole stuck with his heart for keeping fans first.
• Do the opposite of normal. If you want your brand to stand out, doing what’s normal isn’t going to cut it. There’s nothing normal about pitchers wearing stilts, grandma cheerleaders, or turning down ticket buyers. What would it look like for you to zig when everyone else is zagging?
• Leverage your brand personality everywhere. The silly “banana” theme and branding is carried out everywhere. From banana shaped scratch-and-sniff tickets, to banana flavored concessions, to calling their game rules “banana ball” — their fun approach is consistently carried out EVERYWHERE.

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