Dakota Albritton had not played baseball in two years when his mother signed him up for a tryout with a team he had never heard of. She told the coaches he could walk on stilts. He had not done that since he was ten, and on the drive over he realized the straps had dry-rotted, so he stopped at Tractor Supply and strapped the stilts to his legs with dog collars. Then he hit. Albritton now pitches for the Savannah Bananas at roughly ten feet tall, in sold-out Major League ballparks. Two recent pieces make a good pairing for class: a 60 Minutes segment on the team (“Savannah Bananas pack stadiums with their zany twist on baseball,” CBS News, April 13, 2025; also on YouTube) and a full episode of The Daily (“Think Baseball Is Boring? The Savannah Bananas Are Here to Fix That,” The New York Times, August 23, 2026).

Owner Jesse Cole did not start with a gimmick. He started with a measurement problem. Fans kept leaving his games early, so he videotaped his own crowd to find out exactly when they stopped paying attention. The answers were mound visits and batters stepping out of the box. “So we said, what are all the normal rules of a baseball game? What would be the exact opposite?” Banana Ball now runs on a two-hour clock with no mound visits and no bunting. Ball four becomes a sprint, with the batter running until every fielder touches the ball. Catch a foul ball in the stands and the batter is out. The results: 500 consecutive sellouts, six MLB stadiums filled last season including Fenway, more than 11 million TikTok followers, and a waitlist in the millions.

The Daily is the more useful of the two for class, because host Natalie Kitroeff spends the second half arguing with the premise. Optimizing every second for the fan, she argues, buys delight by giving up stakes: let a spectator end an at-bat and you lose the drama of a hitter battling twelve pitches deep. “It’s Disney baseball,” agrees Times reporter Jonathan Abrams. “You’re always going to end up with that happy ending.” The answer worth putting in front of students came from pitcher Derek Klena: “It doesn’t steal a fan base. If anything, fan bases have different options to pursue.” A nine-year-old named Annabelle put it more simply. She likes Banana Ball, and “it doesn’t make me not like baseball.”

Claude was used to generate a first draft of this blog post.

Relevant Chapters in Essentials of Marketing

Banana Ball is a segmentation and positioning case first, which makes it a natural companion to our LEGO opener in Chapter 4 (segmentation, differentiation, and positioning). Chapter 4 defines positioning as how customers think about proposed or present brands in a market, and makes the point that a firm builds a competitive advantage by differentiating its marketing mix — making it distinct from what a competitor offers and better at meeting a particular group’s needs. Cole did this deliberately and in that order: he filmed his own fans to find the moments they disengaged, then wrote rules that were the exact opposite of the ones producing those moments. The result is not a better version of MLB’s mix aimed at MLB’s customers; it is a different mix aimed at people MLB was losing or never had. Chapter 4’s four criteria — segments should be homogeneous within, heterogeneous between, substantial, and operational — give students a way to test that claim, and the interesting wrinkle is that nine-year-old Annabelle likes both, which is exactly the sort of evidence that complicates a clean “different segment” story.

Chapter 8 (elements of product planning for goods and services) is the second anchor, and it supplies the sentence this whole case turns on: Product means the need-satisfying offering of a firm. The Bananas are not selling innings. They are selling a total product offering that happens to contain a baseball game — a pregame show with roughly fifty scripted bits, a grandmother dance team, choreographed at-bat routines, a small child peeling a banana to certify that it is ripe. On Chapter 8’s goods-services continuum this sits far toward the service end, and the chapter’s service characteristics do real work here: the experience is intangible, produced in front of the customer, and perishable. Chapter 8’s brand familiarity ladder is the other payoff. Brand insistence means customers insist on a firm’s branded product and are willing to search for it, and a waitlist in the millions is that. Above it sits brand evangelism — customers so enthusiastic about a brand that they actively spread positive word-of-mouth, which the chapter notes is often motivated by an emotional or values-based connection. The fan The Daily interviewed drove four hours to the game and has a player’s smiley-face eye black tattooed on her wrist.

Chapter 9 (product management and new-product development) is the third connection, and it comes with a callback: our Netflix opener describes a company that, rather than waiting for competitors to disrupt it, started planning its own disruption. That is precisely the question these two pieces raise about Major League Baseball. Chapter 9’s product life cycle — market introduction, market growth, market maturity, sales decline — applies to categories rather than individual brands, and the chapter is explicit that a firm must have some competitive advantage as it moves into market maturity. Students can argue where spectator baseball sits and whether Banana Ball is a new product at all. Chapter 9’s definition is permissive on purpose — a new product is one that is new in any way for the company concerned — and the chapter’s three categories of innovation, grouped by how much customers must change their behavior to adopt, give students a sharper tool than “new or not new.”

Class Discussion Ideas

This one is built for an out-of-class assignment. The 60 Minutes segment runs about thirteen minutes and the Daily episode about thirty-eight, so either works as preparation — the video is faster and shows the trick plays, the podcast is the better choice if you want students to hear the case against. Then the whole class period can run on one question: when a firm changes who its customer is, what else has to change? The activities below build toward students designing a disruption of their own.

In-Class Activities

Same Game, Different Customer. In small groups, have students write two target market descriptions side by side, MLB’s and Banana Ball’s, then mark which of the four Ps differ and which do not. Push them on the ones that do not — both put skilled players on a diamond in the same stadiums. Present findings to the class. (Chapter 4)

Run Cole’s Method. Teams pick something they find boring — a golf broadcast, a museum tour, a graduation ceremony, the campus shuttle, a lecture — and do what Cole did: list the specific moments the audience checks out, then write three rules that are the exact opposite of whatever produces those moments. Each team pitches its target market, its three rules, and the one number it would watch to know whether the change worked. (Chapter 4)

What Are Fans Actually Buying? Individually, students list everything the Bananas sell that is not baseball, place Banana Ball on Chapter 8’s goods-services continuum, and defend the placement to a partner. Follow with the harder question: strip out the dancing and keep only the rule changes — is it still the same product? (Chapter 8)

Is MLB Blockbuster? Split the class and debate whether Major League Baseball should adopt Banana Ball rules, using Chapter 9’s Netflix opener as the precedent for disrupting yourself before someone else does. Assign one side Kitroeff’s argument about stakes and the other Klena’s “fan bases have different options.” (Chapter 9)

Discussion Questions

1. Who is Banana Ball’s target market, and is it the same one Major League Baseball is chasing? (Chapter 4)
   • Answer: Chapter 4 treats segmenting as an aggregating process — grouping customers who will respond similarly to a marketing mix. The Bananas aggregate around a need MLB serves poorly: a two-hour, constantly eventful night out that requires no knowledge of baseball to enjoy. Abrams names the customer directly when he describes younger audiences who do not have the patience or the time to sit and dissect a three-hour game. But students should notice the evidence cutting the other way. Annabelle likes both, and Klena argues the Bananas do not steal a fan base. Chapter 4 asks segments to be heterogeneous between, and overlapping fandom suggests the line here is blurrier than the contrast implies.
2. Cole filmed his own crowd to find out when they stopped watching, then wrote rules that were the exact opposite of what he saw. What does that method show about differentiation? (Chapter 4)
   • Answer: Chapter 4 says a firm builds competitive advantage by differentiating its mix so target customers perceive it as uniquely suited to them. Cole did not start from the product; he started from watching the customer disengage, which is what makes this differentiation rather than novelty. Worth noticing that much of his differentiation is subtractive — removing mound visits, walks, bunts, and step-outs — not additive. Strong answers will point out that “do the opposite” only works because he first identified which normal rules were costing him attention. The research is the method; the yellow tuxedo is the output.
3. What is the Savannah Bananas’ Product? (Chapter 8)
   • Answer: Chapter 8 defines Product as the need-satisfying offering of a firm, and warns that managers get wrapped up in technical details while customers think in terms of the total satisfaction provided. The Bananas sell an evening, not innings: the pregame show, the dance numbers, the chance to catch a foul ball and change the game. Even the yellow ball is a mix decision made for the spectator rather than the player. Students who answer “baseball” are applying exactly the producer’s definition the chapter cautions against.
4. A fan drove four hours to a game and has a player’s smiley-face eye black tattooed on her wrist. Where does that fall on Chapter 8’s brand familiarity ladder, and what got the Bananas there? (Chapter 8)
   • Answer: A waitlist in the millions is brand insistence — customers insisting on the brand and willing to search for it. The tattoo, the four-hour drive, and 11 million TikTok followers circulating clips are brand evangelism, which Chapter 8 defines as customers so enthusiastic that they actively spread positive word-of-mouth, often driven by an emotional or values-based connection. The mechanism is visible in the product itself: the “Fans First” motto, the postgame ceremony honoring every fan who caught a foul ball, the players signing for hours before first pitch. Worth pressing students on how little of this was bought — the Bananas got here in about ten years with almost no traditional advertising.
5. Using the product life cycle, where would you place spectator baseball, and where would you place Banana Ball? (Chapter 9)
   • Answer: Chapter 9 applies the life cycle to categories rather than individual brands and notes that profits typically begin to decline while sales are still rising. Most students will place professional spectator baseball in market maturity, the stage where the chapter says a firm must have some competitive advantage to keep winning, and Banana Ball in introduction or early growth. The question worth forcing is whether they are the same product-market at all. If Banana Ball is a segment of spectator baseball, MLB has a competitor; if it is a separate product-market closer to live entertainment, it does not. The strategic advice changes completely depending on which answer students defend.
6. Is Banana Ball actually a new product? (Chapter 9)
   • Answer: Chapter 9 sets a deliberately low bar — a new product is one that is new in any way for the company concerned — and then sorts innovations by how much customers must change their behavior to adopt them. That second tool is the useful one here. For a non-fan, Banana Ball asks for almost no behavior change; it is a night out. For a purist like Abrams, it asks for a great deal, which is why his first reaction was that it seemed like an abomination. Same product, very different adoption cost depending on which segment the customer starts in.
7. Kitroeff (host of The Daily podcast) argues that maximizing joy costs you stakes: give fans the power to end an at-bat and you lose the drama of a hitter battling twelve pitches deep. Can a firm over-optimize for what customers say they want? (Chapters 4 and 9)
   • Answer: Open-ended by design, and the best question to close on. Chapter 4’s logic is that superior value is defined from the target customer’s point of view, so within its own target market the Bananas are not over-optimized at all — they are doing precisely what the framework prescribes. Kitroeff’s objection is really that she is not in that target market. Strong answers separate the two claims that get blurred together: “this is a worse product” versus “this is a product for someone else.” Abrams’ own resolution, that Banana Ball is the alt rock of baseball rather than a replacement for it, is Chapter 4’s multiple target market approach stated in a fan’s language.