A Man, A Plan, A Canal, Panama

I would like to invite you all to head over to Bullridingmarketing blog to savor Kris DiLorenzo’s most excellent post about one of the PBR’s more recent blunders, a marketing survey conducted over a period of 30 days with a group of invited participants. The Divine Miz D has a field day with this subject, and I would not want any of you to miss a single salient, laser-guided observation.

There’s no need for me to recount here the details of her observations, but her principal point bears repeating: Despite the PBR’s continuous efforts to force its fans into little boxes (cowboys? cowgirls? SAHMs? heavy-metal fans? extreme fighting fans?), the bottom line is that there is NO typical PBR fan. 

You’d think that finding this out would actually make marketing the sport a lot simpler, because those developing the campaigns could focus on the obvious: It’s the sport that’s the draw, not the so-called culture of the sport, the existence of which is suspect to begin with.

That’s it, folks—the boys versus the bulls. Straight-up competition, one on one, no guts, no glory, no pain, no gain, no balls, no babies. That’s what makes my heart beat faster, that’s why I’m still here despite all the crap that the PBR keeps dishing out, and it baffles me to now end why somebody in Pueblo can’t just grab hold of this one fact and follow it where it leads.

This could be the idea with the potential to finally take the sport into the mainstream: People love to watch the boys and the bulls square off on the dirt. It’s time to just acknowledge it, embrace it, and run with it. All the rest is bullshit that unfortunately is not being produced by bulls. It’s time, as Grandma Lee famously said in her too-brief run on America’s Got Talent several years ago, to cut the crap.