Turning Customers Into Fans

Tom Nixon (00:03.02)
Well, Curtis, we are fast approaching my favorite time of year. It’s almost September. I’ve got a birthday September. Yes, September 1st is my birthday. We’ve got Labor Day weekend, which I always celebrate my birthday for an extended weekend. We’ve got fall weather coming up here in Michigan, which I love. And most important of all, perhaps we have football season is right on the horizon.

Curtis Hays (00:10.308)
Which is your birthday month, right?

Curtis Hays (00:26.722)
Yep, and we got a lot to be excited about here in Detroit for football season, don’t we?

Tom Nixon (00:31.672)
Yeah. I mean, for 52 of my 54 years on this planet, I wasn’t all that excited to be honest with you, except for maybe the Barry Sims or yeah, Barry Sanders and Billy Sims eras, which were, you know, kind of slices of Detroit lions lore, but that’s all changing. Thanks in part, maybe to our guests

Curtis Hays (00:50.424)
Yes. Yeah, we’ve got a great guest today. Good, good friend of mine. without, without further ado, I’ll introduce, Scott Howland, who’s the, senior manager of CRM and marketing research at the Detroit lions. I met Scott, a number of years ago, our daughters, were playing softball together in the Birmingham softball league. And we got the opportunity to, to coach our daughters together for a couple of years. And, was great to know, get to know Scott and,

Is it four daughters, five daughters, Four daughters, all in sports, big Michigan fans, I think, right? And play soccer and softball and travel and then Scott here with the Detroit Lions. So great to have you on the show today, Scott. Thanks for coming on.

Scott Howland (01:23.129)
Four dollars, not five yet.

Scott Howland (01:31.513)
Yes, yes sir, go blue.

Scott Howland (01:42.403)
Yeah guys, thanks for having me. Tom, I echo all your sentiments on the time of year. My birthday is also in September too. So one of my favorite times of year for sure.

Tom Nixon (01:51.288)
Nice.

Curtis Hays (01:53.06)
Yeah, so I got a great story about Scott. So he taught me quite a bit about coaching. I was a baseball guy. And I did coach T -ball with the girls when they were younger. And then got into softball. And so I had to transition because some of the rules are a bit different. And so Scott taught me for a couple years. And then as our daughters got older, we actually got split apart on the different teams. And I kind of ended up with a rag, a bunch set of girls who

Like didn’t know each other. They all kind of came on the team and very few knew they were all from different schools. So we were a little bit like we were the Grizzlies, but we’re kind of like the bad news bears a little bit. We ended up having a really good season, made it to the finals. And of course we’re playing Scott and his girls. was just, he had just had a powerhouse of a team and he, but he out coached me. All the girls played excellent. We had to out coach me. So Tom, don’t know if you know this, like in baseball, you,

I know we’re talking about baseball and softball here and it’s football season. We’ll get to football in a second, but in baseball, if you pull your pitcher from the game, you can’t put them back in. In softball. This is how Scott beat me. He put his best pitcher against my top players at the top of my up top of the lineup. And then the second inning took her out and then put in a second pitcher.

And then when it got to the third and fourth inning and my top of my lineup was up again, he put his best pitcher back in. You can rotate your pitchers, like rotate them back

Tom Nixon (03:23.202)
I was gonna say that sounds like cheating, but it was just out foxing you.

Curtis Hays (03:26.862)
But you could do it in girl softball apparently. did not know this rule. was like, I saw this girl come back up on the mountain. I was like, wait, what is he doing? He can’t do that.

Scott Howland (03:34.213)
It’s all about playing the matchups.

Tom Nixon (03:35.798)
Hopefully by. Yeah, hopefully since then you’ve wielded that tactic against your opponents, Curtis.

Curtis Hays (03:37.925)
Yup.

Curtis Hays (03:41.936)
And so we actually got out of softball after that. I he just defeated us so bad. We’re just like, you know what? We can’t compete. No, no,

Scott Howland (03:46.629)
You make me feel bad, Curtis, make me feel bad. But yes, that was it. You got to know the rules. You got to look for those edges. you know, I guess in some cases how to kind of not exploit them, but use them to your advantage. But that was one that definitely kept in my back pocket for several years. But I think the cat’s out of the bag on that now. I see a lot of our teams doing that just to get those right matchups when you want

Curtis Hays (04:12.708)
Yep, I didn’t see it the whole entire season and then we get to the championship game and Scott uses it against me. I thought we were friends, buddy. I thought we were friends.

Scott Howland (04:17.317)
Yes.

Tom Nixon (04:21.08)
Well, speaking of championships at the end of seasons, we need to talk about the Super Bowl contending Detroit Lions. Scott, I kind of alluded at the beginning by mixing up Barry Sanders and Billy Sims that I lived through the Billy Sims glory. Another one bites the dust. I lived through the Barry Sanders 12 and four season. None of those neither of those or anything in between felt as authentic

real as what we’re experiencing now as Lions fans. This feels like it’s got staying power. We might contend for a Super Bowl this year. We practically did last year. This has got to be a different somebody who’s been in customer relations and in marketing in general and strategy. It’s got to be a different animal for you now that like the Lions are the hottest ticket in town.

Scott Howland (05:07.621)
Yeah, it is completely changed. I came over to the Lions in 2015. And so I think we had one playoff year under Jim Caldwell right around the start of my time here. And then, you know, kind of switched errors, moved on from him and didn’t have a lot of success there in the middle. And now with under coach, you know, Dan Campbell and Brad Holmes at the helm. Agreed. think they’ve got they’ve built something great here. And, you know, last year was phenomenal, completely different. First

game in 30 plus years, right, and hosting it here in Detroit and getting a chance to host two playoff games here in Detroit was definitely special. And so, yeah, for the business side where I sit, it’s created new problems, but good problems to have, right, good things to try to figure out and how to solve

Tom Nixon (05:56.748)
Well, one of those problems, good problems is the ticket memberships are sold out now. Right. And are you moving more toward a customer retention and customer loyalty strategy as opposed to customer acquisition? I’m talking like a marketing geek because that’s what Curtis and I are,

Scott Howland (06:02.853)
Correct, yep.

Scott Howland (06:13.497)
Yeah, yeah, yeah, for a long time, a lot of our focus and the way that our ticketing team was structured was ticket sales individuals going out trying to find those new season ticket members. And I see we’re charged with trying to figure out how to point them in the right direction, give them the right prospects, kind of mine some of our ticketing data to find those people. And that’s all kind of gone away in the last year since we sold out, right? So now some of those people who were previously

ticket sales reps are now transitioning into more service roles because we have this huge base of season ticket holders and we need to make sure that we’re servicing them the right way and providing the right experience for them. So it’s definitely shifted more from sales over to service as we move down

Tom Nixon (06:58.56)
Hey Curtis this reminds me, Emily Belak from The Martech Group. When we talked about understanding the entirety of the funnel, which happens before somebody becomes a customer. It continues long past after they become a customer. This is all this ringing a bell to you as a fellow marketing

Curtis Hays (07:16.234)
It definitely and adapting and adjusting your organization based on where you’re at with those types of things too, right? So going back to, you know, the frontline, you know, salespeople who maybe were doing a bunch of outbound calls before are now receiving, you know, inbound calls or, or their type of calls are now something different. So you’ve got to, you’ve got to readjust and, you know, maybe retrain some of the folks, right?

Scott Howland (07:43.183)
Yep. Yep.

Curtis Hays (07:43.752)
And you’ve got some new KPIs that you’re measuring towards and new initiatives. And so it’s important to do

Scott Howland (07:53.689)
Yes, it’s been a good shift for sure. Like I said, we tried, we focused a lot on that handoff before, right, between from getting the person from the sales when the sales was made over to that service team and making sure that was a seamless transition and that we were onboarding new season ticket members in the right way so that they were learning about the benefits that came with their season ticket membership with us and how to get the best out of their game day experience. But now, that handoff’s kind of done.

On the sales side, we still do a little bit. We’re figuring out, honestly, how to manage that waiting list, right? And we’re still trying to add people to that waiting list so that we’re in a good position moving forward there. But yeah, it’s different, right? It’s definitely different than how it had been in years prior.

Tom Nixon (08:38.198)
got one of the first, or actually the first commandment of the bull horns and bulls eyes podcast is know thine customer. And, we’re now this is the third leg of a three, episode story arc where two episodes ago, we talked with a brand strategist who part of her process, the imperative first part of her process is getting her clients to understand the customer base. And it’s not a monolithic, which goes back to our

or last week’s episode with Emily, is we talked about dicing these people into personas and segmenting your audience. So you’re not just doing a one messaging or either vehicle or tactic or message itself fits all type of strategy. I know that you now I’m guessing you have to take a whole new look at this customer base as this loyal waiting list, you know, fan base, as opposed to, geez, we got to get people.

interested. I know you guys were always selling up the stadium, but it’s not like it is now. So what are you doing as a team to really understand your customer base, which are fans?

Scott Howland (09:42.149)
Yes, yeah, we’re doing a lot to try to capture that fan profile. And, you know, this has been a big thing. We work with the NFL as well. The NFL kind of drives a lot of stuff down through all 32 teams there on top of the things that we do at our own team level. But we definitely we try to understand, you know, tenure is a big thing with us. If somebody’s been a season ticket holder, you know, Tom, like you said, with maybe with your tenure, who’s been with us for 50 years, they need a

way of being serviced than the person who’s here for the first time or our rookie season ticket members that we have here, right? So that’s one thing, even out of training camp, right? We had five days of training camp last week and we have different levels of memberships, right? So you can be in our premium club area, which is a little higher level experience there and we try to treat them in a different way. And so we have a VIP tent experience out of training camp as opposed to just general fan who’s maybe coming through the doors.

going to sit in the bleachers and watch training camp. So all that stuff, we try to tailor according to the experience that we want to deliver, but also to the experience that makes sense for the person as an individual.

Tom Nixon (10:53.4)
Could you talk through maybe some of the actual data gathering initiatives that you will execute to understand these various personas?

Scott Howland (11:02.819)
Yeah, so first and foremost, we try to enrich our data as best we can. So if you become a season ticket holder with us, we can go out and there’s ways of purchasing additional levels of data on here, right? Getting your education level or household income, just some of the basic demographic stuff that’s out there through different services. So that kind of helps set a baseline for some of those personas there. But really, we dive a lot into surveying our fans.

even getting into some focus groups, one -on -one type interviews with them there. So one of the main surveys that we do is called the NFL’s Voice of the Fan. And the NFL coordinates this, again, with all the teams so that they can benchmark and provide insights across all the teams. But that’s one that we’ve done for years. Provides us a pretty good level of understanding of the customer, but we kind of wanted something more. So last year we worked with them.

in order to kind of deliver our own voice of the fan survey there so we could get even deeper into different questions and different profiles that they liked. So that went pretty well. We were able to really do some fun stuff with that too. We wanted to kind of keep it fresh. So we would ask them around Thanksgiving, what’s the best Thanksgiving side or what’s your favorite Christmas tradition? There’s things like that nature there. So in addition to capturing just some of the basics around like who your favorite player is.

maybe what your shirt size is, some actionable things that we can do with data

Tom Nixon (12:36.414)
I was reminded this morning, Curtis, working with a client that it’s so important to take this data of converted customers and feed that back into your marketing strategy, both literally and figuratively. So you could talk through the ways that people do that. But so many companies, as we talked about from the very beginning of the season, fail to do that. They just feel like.

customer acquisition is the end of a success story and that’s all there is to it. When really you need that data don’t you to go back and inform both your strategy and the algorithms that are operating on your behalf.

Curtis Hays (13:06.798)
Yeah, it’s like they put so much work into the front end on the acquisition side. Purchasing data or lists and then paying money to advertise and do all these other things. And then they acquire the customer and then they don’t do anything more after that. At least from a data perspective, right? So they don’t survey, they don’t ask. Yeah, and I think that’s the biggest thing is you’re not gonna get anything unless you ask, right?

Well, we talked about quite a bit, Tom, and what we’re trying to do with more of our customers is to ask existing customers who have had not only good experience, but a poor experience, and get their feedback. Because it’s going to allow you to shift and adjust what you’re doing from a service or product level. And it might inform you what you should be doing from a marketing perspective as well.

Tom Nixon (13:58.71)
Yeah, it just to go expand on that point, we’re also now asking clients for richer data than simply who converted and who didn’t. So in the case of this client, I’m thinking of a conversion was a visit to a website and fill out of a form, right? So that’s a conversion. Now, if all we took was that data and fed it back to the algorithms, then anyone who took that action looks like a good.

lead right but what we want to know is that what happened after that conversion that conversion they haven’t become a customer yet in this client’s case so when you follow up with them out of the 50 or 100 people say 100 people that filled out the form how many of those look like good leads meaning somebody called them or found some other way to qualify them and then of the qualified leads so maybe there’s 50 qualified out of 100 how many become clients because we don’t want the 40 that didn’t become clients even though they look good on paper we want to know about the 10 that became clients

That’s what we want our algorithms to go looking for, isn’t

Curtis Hays (14:53.166)
Yep. Yep. A hundred percent. And I can see Scott, it sounds like, you when you had mentioned some of this data, like, you know, their education level and, know, some demographic info, right? So knowing that demographic information about who’s, who’s purchasing, who, who’s buying, who’s loyal, you know, informs you about how to make a better use of marketing. Yeah. Going forward. Why, why spend marketing on audiences?

that at the end of the day likely aren’t going to be interested or maybe can’t afford. I’ve got a project we’re working on with a client right now, a product that’s five times what a normal person who would be interested in this product would purchase. So let’s say this normal item is $1 ,000. They’re $5 ,000. So to look at the general audience and say, anyone

in our general audience would purchase this is incorrect. it’s not an impulse buy. It’s not even a mind broke. need a replacement purchase. There’s some advantages to this $5 ,000 product versus the a hundred thousand or the $1 ,000 product. You have to now communicate those advantages, but communicate it only to that audience who’s likely to purchase. If you communicate it to people who can’t afford who or who maybe could afford, but aren’t going to see the benefit.

Scott Howland (15:56.867)
it.

Curtis Hays (16:20.874)
your marketing is going to waste.

Scott Howland (16:23.429)
Yeah, real life example on that, Curtis, you guys think back last year, we had Taylor Swift here at Fort Field, hottest concert of the summer last year, right? Very difficult to get tickets for, sold out within minutes. But we had, as you pointed out, Tom, a web form up for some of our premium suites, right? And that’s a higher level experience for sure, a higher level ticket price. It designed more for 20 people, have your own space, catered food and beverage, all that stuff, right?

We were trying to find targets for that. But we got flooded with our web form from people who just wanted to figure out how to get tickets to Taylor Swift. In a lot of cases, it was 13, 14 -year -old girls going on our website and figuring this out. Well, sorry, but you don’t have thousands of dollars needed to purchase a suite to Taylor Swift. So we had to do some things to sift through those leads and make sure that we were spending our time efficiently on the right ones there.

Tom Nixon (17:20.93)
Yeah.

One of the things I know that you do Scott to glean some of these insights from fans and customers is focus groups, which, you know, focus groups in the last maybe 20 or 30 years sort of became like this, you know, it was looked on as trite or, you know, relic of the past, you know, the Pepsi taste challenge or whatever it was. It focus groups are not that. So first of all, I’m a huge advocate for what focus groups can be. And these are, you know, qualitative research studies, you know, with conversations with real people that

glean really deep insights, far more than, you know, some data in a survey typically. But there’s a funny story about how your focus groups began and share with us and tell us how your focus groups maybe evolved from this funny story.

Scott Howland (18:06.125)
Yeah, yeah. So when I started here, my position was hired in the marketing department. And I came in, you know, super excited to be in the NFL and be with the Lions and just wanted to learn every single part of the business. So I told them, hey, you know, it was was getting ready to kick off the season about this time. And I said, you know, what are my game day responsibilities going to be? And I said, I’m up for doing anything. I just want to be here. Just want to learn, take it all in.

Long story short, I ended up at the kids face painting table. And so they put me there, a dollar a cheek to get the leaping lion painted on your face there. And that was good and I learned that and it took me probably half a game to kind of really understand how to run that. But I was there for basically the entire first season and then actually I hired an e -marketing manager about half a week through the season and he came to run that station with me.

We hired another marketing guy, he came to run that with me. And so you end up with these three big guys in suits, you know, they’re kind of manning the kid’s face paint table. Not the most welcoming thing there. So I came to the off season, I said, hey, that was great, know, great, I got that experience, but I can’t, I don’t want to do that again, right? I can do something more. So I had, you know, some experience with focus groups from a prior job there. And I said, all right, I’m gonna try this. I’m gonna propose focus groups for the next year.

executed them and lo and behold, some of our executive team, loved them, they loved getting the videos and recaps afterwards and it’s been on ever since with the focus groups there.

Tom Nixon (19:41.304)
Were there any surprises that came out of that first focus group? Because typically, not typically, but oftentimes when I’m doing focus groups, will either the client will be watching or watching a replay and there’s some eye -opener because so many times companies, brands, whatever think they know their customers so well and they do to an extent, but there’s these blind spots and those blind spots can be game changing. Either you can pursue an opportunity you didn’t know was there or you can fix a problem you didn’t realize was festering. So in your case, any surprises that came from those early focus groups?

Scott Howland (20:11.513)
Yeah, I think early on, I was just surprised at how much people enjoyed being in the room and how much they wanted to be a part of it. And I understand that we’re unique in sports and obviously there’s a connection to the team. So, you know, other businesses don’t have that, but we’re lucky where we have people who want to talk to us in a lot of cases there.

So yeah, that was nice and also sometimes just learning how to kind of guide the conversation to keep it productive and get what we want out of it. Sometimes you get some fans in the room who really want to dominate and kind of take it different directions than where you’re hoping to go with it there. And that’s beneficial too actually because you kind of learn what people want to talk about and where the passion and the value lies for them there. So while I might have a three page kind of script or outline of questions that I want to get to.

Sometimes I get to half of it because we end up diving into a topic that really nets some good conversation there. And so we just kind of go down that

Tom Nixon (21:12.997)
Curtis, I don’t know if I have a question, but I just want to observe for the listening audience who can’t see the video. You’re wearing Honolulu blue and I’m wearing silver. So it’s like, we’re right on brand today. We didn’t even plan it.

Curtis Hays (21:23.224)
We’re trying to be on brand, yeah.

Scott Howland (21:27.575)
Yeah, Tom, sometimes I have people come in the focus groups. I’ve had people come in with Matt wearing masks or face paint or all the crazy fans that we have that you see on game day. We’ll get them in the room. Even sometimes people walk in and they’ll set a beer on the table, which I always encourage because you get a few of that in you, then you’re more willing to speak a little freely

Tom Nixon (21:49.388)
Yes, Scott, I observed something. just touched on something and jogged a memory here. Just the other day I was on social media and somebody observed about Lions fans that used to be used to go to the game in the jerseys. You saw were, you know, Spielman, Porsche, Sanders, you know, all these past heroes. And now you go to the stadium and you’re seeing Hutchinson and you’re seeing Saint Brown and you’re seeing golf. And so like going back to understanding your customer, you have this now this.

huge segment of your audience who isn’t just loving the brand because of the legacy that they remember. It’s like they’re really new. They’re in the tribe in a fresh and new way. So are you seeing a shift in sort of the dynamics with in some of your efforts and some of your study?

Scott Howland (22:34.757)
Well, I think with some of those players you mentioned, and this goes back to my Pistons days too with the 0 -4 team, Hutchinson, St. Brown, they really represent kind of the blue collar work ethic of Detroit. And so we have those players that I think the fans are really connecting with. So that’s been great to see. And then it doesn’t hurt, but we recently had a rebrand. So we’ve got new uniforms now. So over the past

And going into this season, fans are kind of wanting to refresh their wardrobe and make sure they’ve got the latest look and everything there. And that’s actually one of the things that we talked about in some of our focus groups. And it’s fun to kind of talk with fans and hear what direction they want, you know, our uniforms to go or certain logos and stuff there and the ties that they have to some of the history that we have there and wanting to see that. So, you know, we brought back the black uniforms this year.

A large part of that was Dan Campbell and he liked those. But I remember sitting in many focus groups where people talked about the eras of the black uniforms and wanting those to be back on the

Tom Nixon (23:46.126)
Curtis, I can either turn it over to you for a question or stump you with a question that I have for you, which would you prefer? Okay. So you’ve got a client, hypothetically that has evolved from a customer acquisition, acquisition strategy to retention and loyalty. And they say they’re going to go out and gather some data. What data would you want to see? then how do you suspect your marketing mix might shift in such an occasion? Because you

Curtis Hays (23:51.828)
Let’s stump me, yeah.

Tom Nixon (24:14.912)
Scott’s doing the hard work of telling the marketers what he’s hearing and seeing on the ground. What should they do with it?

Curtis Hays (24:21.55)
Yeah, well, I’d start asking a bunch of why questions, which I’ve learned from you, right? So why did you buy? Why do you continue to do business, right? So what are the benefits that you’re getting out of it? What would you maybe say to somebody else who was interested in the product or service? And then go back and try to match that to what we’re actually, is

Tom Nixon (24:25.322)
Hmm.

Curtis Hays (24:50.776)
match with what we’re actually communicating to our target audience. and, and are we actually offering, you know, those types of things? like Scott’s saying, like they, knows his target market. Well, I just mentioned blue collar of Detroit, right? So, you know, I got to imagine there’s some, there’s some planning from that perspective, from knowing your demographics and then knowing what the team is doing, which would be more of the delivery side, which you don’t have any control over. as marketers.

We don’t, even if you’re a company, we don’t have necessarily direct control over what happens on the service end. so I think giving that feedback, getting that feedback and having a pathway to communicate that and have it received internally in the organization and hopefully acted on, and then being able to respond, you know, to those types of things to, to be able to say, Hey, we have the opportunity to, you know, maybe do better.

Scott Howland (25:22.585)
Yep.

Curtis Hays (25:49.306)
from an apparel or whatever side of the business if we do these types of things here because our audience is X. So knowing that audience, knowing what they value, knowing what’s important to them can help you make those shifts.

Tom Nixon (26:05.848)
Yeah. And I would just, I’m no expert Scott, but the way I look at it is customer retention is customer acquisition. Like keeping those customers happy in the funnel and hopefully turning them into brand advocates that might do some marketing on your behalf is huge. And if you don’t believe me, just ask somebody who ran the marketing for a team that went on 16, how difficult it is to acquire a loyal fan base. Right? Scott.

Scott Howland (26:29.155)
Yes, yes, absolutely. And every year we go through renewals with our season ticket members. And, you know, it’s always a big, big initiative for us to keep as many of them as possible. Right. Because then it’s just less new customers that you have to find. Obviously, that’s one on one. Right. But so even it’s no secret in the last few years, we’ve had some price increases. Right. And so that’s affected decisions on some of our season ticket members there. And, you know, I think we’re delivering a strong product and there’s a lot

additional benefits and things that come with the season ticket membership and we’ve been able to renew at a great rate over the last couple years there. absolutely keeping them is far easier than going out and finding those other ones.

Curtis Hays (27:12.538)
So speaking of KPIs, if I could really quick then Tom, did Scott, are you giving objectives or the team giving objectives to say that this year we want to hit X renewal rate? You guys have those KPIs and how are you measuring those if you are within the

Scott Howland (27:31.843)
We do, yes. We have some models that we use to try to project what we think our real rate is going to be based on how you’re using your tickets. That’s probably the biggest indicator. Are you coming to games? Are you getting to see the value of those tickets? And if you’re not coming to the games, Curtis, are you passing them on to Tom or somebody else in your organization that is able to use them there? So there’s that. Tenure is a long one, too, if you’ve been here for

10 years already, it’s more likely that you’re gonna stay as opposed to somebody who’s maybe a first year season ticket member. So we look at that and then we use that to really kind of project out some of our revenue goals and things that we have there. So if we’re able to renew, let’s say, 90 % every year, then how much do we need to do in new business to achieve our goals there? So yes, we go through that on a continual basis.

Tom Nixon (28:27.318)
Yeah. The point I was going to make is, you know, if you can see that customer retention is a form of customer acquisition in your case, in others was limited supply. Then that retention creates scarcity because there’s only so many seats in the stadium and that scarcity commands premium. So you can actually through your customer retention efforts, hopefully, you know, incrementally increase what you charge in the value that you pride. got two last things for you, Scott. One is a question.

And the other is just a quick observation. My question is you, you call this the floating lion. Is that right? That’s on your shirt. Leaping line. What did they call that old school lion that I love the sleek one with the two stripes behind it? Is there a name for that old school logo?

Scott Howland (29:13.381)
I don’t know if there’s an official name for that, but funny story from a focus group, tying back to that, that I never noticed looking at that logo before. I did a focus group with kids two years ago, two seasons ago now, and we were talking about using that logo during our 90th season. And so we were showing them a bunch of the old logos, and it was interesting, my first time trying to lead a focus group with kids ranging from like seven to 11, age range.

And one of the kids pointed out that that logo you’re talking about, if you look at it closely, it looks like it has a like an eight foot long tail. And it comes up and comes like almost all the way along the back, back by his head there. So I don’t know what the exact one is, but take a second look at that. You’ll notice how long the tail is.

Tom Nixon (30:00.78)
Yeah, that just reminds me. I think it’s from the fifties or sixties, right? It’s just, remember seeing it as a kid and it’s again, it’s one of those things that brands can take advantage of. That’s it. That’s the guy. Yep.

Scott Howland (30:08.502)
That’s actually this one here, right?

Tom Nixon (30:12.626)
it’s just, know, nostalgia can be a great brand asset. So, all right. And then my final thing is I just need to encourage people. If you’re on social media, you need to follow the Detroit lines. I follow them on Twitter. It’s a great follow. I don’t follow many professional sports franchises. You would the ones that I’m a big fan of, but it’s entertaining. It’s a little bit. I don’t want to say irreverent cause that’s going to stop, but the way that the Wendy’s account is entertaining, you

It’s just, it’s worth following even if you’re not Detroit Lions fan, but it’s one of the best in the business. So whoever your team is over there, hopefully they’re going to listen to this episode and take the kudos that I intend for them. So go follow at Detroit Lions for

Scott Howland (30:52.522)
Definitely appreciate that. They do a great job for sure and always looking to kind of push the boundaries a little bit there but again giving the fans what they want there for

Tom Nixon (31:02.27)
Exactly. Curtis, any final thoughts or final questions before you let your friend Scott go?

Curtis Hays (31:05.902)
No, I mean, what else are you excited for this season, Scott? mean, obviously, we’ll see what happens, but there’s a lot of excitement around the team and hopefully we get to the playoffs again. And I think there’s a good opportunity for that to happen. But what are you excited about? And I guess, what other things are you guys doing now that you’re booked out? And it’s going to be a little bit harder to get into games. What are your advice to those fans

want to still have a good experience and those types of things.

Scott Howland (31:38.265)
Yeah, well, I obviously with the success that we’ve had, I’m excited about some of the prime time games and you we kick off week one against, you know, Matthew Stafford and the Rams again on Sunday night football. We’ve got a Monday night football game at the end of September against Seattle. So those are always fun. Kind of out of our normal routine where I’m used to being here on Sunday at one o ‘clock. So late nights with Monday night and Sunday night football,

That is super exciting and there’s just a different energy in the building for the fans on those games.

Tom Nixon (32:12.6)
especially with math just after it in the house.

Scott Howland (32:14.917)
that added an element as well. But I think, you we’ve got some fun things planned for this year. You know, we do a lot of recognition of our former players and doing a good job bringing them back into the fold. So there’s some things planned around that as well. And then hopefully, again, we get to the end of the season and we have some meaningful games and some more home playoff games come 2025.

Curtis Hays (32:40.72)
Who’s in the lineup for Thanksgiving Day?

Tom Nixon (32:41.046)
Awesome.

Scott Howland (32:44.633)
the lineup for Thanksgiving Day in terms of

Curtis Hays (32:46.126)
Yeah, no, who are we playing against?

Scott Howland (32:49.941)
that is against Chicago, so we’ll have number one pick, Caleb Williams, and the Bears will be in town.

Curtis Hays (32:55.64)
Yeah, yeah, that’s gonna be a great game.

Tom Nixon (32:56.994)
I’ll give you my prediction on Caleb Williams offline. So, I, know he’s a big fan. He listens to the podcast. So, all right. Well, we should let you go, Scott. September 8th is going to be here before you know it. That is when Matt Stafford comes to town. Prime time. You mentioned it. it’s going to be exciting season and September 8th, I will have already been celebrating my birthday for a whole week. Probably still will be. and we’ll be watching, we’ll be rooting you on. I would just like to conclude by two quick things.

Scott Howland (33:00.61)
All right.

Tom Nixon (33:25.728)
Remember the first commandment of the Bullhorns and Bulls Eyes podcast is know thine customer. And then the four or five words that I heard Scott say today is true for football teams and it’s true for brands. Give the fans what they want. That’s the takeaway. If you know that customer, you could give the fans what they want and they’ll keep coming back for more.

Scott Howland (33:47.031)
Absolutely, yes guys. Thank you very much for having me. Go Lions!

Tom Nixon (33:50.104)
Go Lions!