By Jack Mackey
Getting to First Base
“Moneyball” provides insight on customer loyalty
I
recommend you get your management team together and take them to
see the baseball movie “Moneyball,”
adapted from the book by Michael
Lewis. You buy the popcorn and I promise
you that “Moneyball” will deliver some
powerful lessons about winning, and
sustaining, customer loyalty.
If you’re wondering what a movie
about baseball has to do with customer
loyalty, I can give you the answer in one
word: insight.
The movie tells the story of how the
Oakland Athletics first applied statistical analysis to winning major league
baseball games. They built a predictive
model where the key variable to winning
was found to be getting on base. Lewis
explained it like this: “… if you ran the
analysis, you could see that the number
of runs a team scored bore little relation
to that team’s batting average. [Runs
scored] correlated much more exactly
with a team’s on-base percentage and
slugging percentage.”
That “Aha” discovery—what those of
us in the customer analytics business call
insight—was a game-changer.
By having the guts to act on this insight, the A’s general manager, Billy Beane
(played by Brad Pitt in the movie), was
able to win the same number of games
with a $39 million payroll as the New
York Yankees were able to win while
spending $141 million.
Oakland spent so much less on payroll than New York by changing the way
they selected players. From Oakland’s
perspective, the patience to draw a walk
(get on base) should be as highly valued
as the abil