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On May 2, 2026, more than 102,000 people showed up at Kyle Field to watch the Savannah Bananas play baseball.
Sort of.
Kyle Field is Texas A&M’s football stadium. It is not a quirky little minor league park with a hot dog cannon and a mascot named Buster.
It seats more than 100,000 people.
And they filled it for Banana Ball.
That’s the kind of thing that makes me stop and ask a question.
Not, “How did they go viral?”
Not even, “How did they make baseball more fun?”
The better question is:
What did they actually build?
Because I don’t think the Savannah Bananas are really competing with baseball teams anymore.
And that’s where the marketing lesson gets interesting.
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First, a quick hello
If this is your first Marketing Everywhere email, welcome.
I’ve spent most of my career in marketing, and now I teach it.
One thing I’ve learned pretty quickly in the classroom is that students understand marketing a lot faster when the example feels like something happening in the real world instead of something preserved in amber in Chapter 12.
That doesn’t mean the textbook is useless. Not even close.
It just means sometimes the concept needs a pulse.
That’s what I’m trying to do here.
Twice a month, I take something happening in brands, culture, sports, media, or everyday life and pull out the marketing lesson hiding inside it.
Then we figure out how to teach it.
So, yes, today we’re talking about a baseball team that celebrates all things banana.
But what we’re really talking about is category creation.
The Bananas had a baseball problem
The easy version of the Savannah Bananas story is that they wore yellow, danced, made weird videos, TikTok loved them, and the whole thing took off.
Nice story.
It’s just not the interesting part.
When Jesse and Emily Cole were trying to get the team off the ground in Savannah, they had a much more basic problem.
People weren’t sticking around.
Fans liked the entertainment around the game, but they were still leaving before the game itself was over.
That matters because the obvious answer would’ve been to add more entertainment. Better promotions. Better music. More between-inning stuff. Maybe fireworks, because when in doubt, America tends to add fireworks.
But eventually you have to ask a harder question.
What if the problem isn’t what’s happening around the product?
What if the problem is the product?
That’s the question the Bananas started answering.
Baseball can be slow. It can have long stretches where not much happens. If you already love baseball, that can be part of the charm.
If you don’t already love baseball, it can feel like everyone else got an instruction manual you missed.
So the Bananas started changing the rules. They put a two-hour limit on games. They banned bunting. They got rid of mound visits. Fans can catch foul balls for outs. Batters can steal first. You’re a baseball purist; I realize I may have just ruined your morning.
But those rules aren’t random. They’re attacking friction.
The game takes too long, so shorten it. Fans feel passive, so give them a role. Too much dead time? Remove some of it.
They made it easier to enjoy for people who didn’t already know how to love baseball.
That’s where category creation comes in
This is the part I’d bring into class.
Most students understand differentiation pretty quickly. You have a product. Someone else has a similar product. Your job is to give people a reason to pick yours.
Category creation is different.
You stop asking, “How do we become the better baseball team?”
And you start asking, “Why are we assuming baseball is the thing people are buying?”
That changes everything.
If the Savannah Bananas are selling baseball, then they’re competing with other baseball teams.
But if they’re selling a memorable night out, now they’re competing with concerts, theme parks, comedy shows, college football, Netflix, family movie night, and basically anything else someone might choose to do on a Saturday.
That’s a much bigger competitive set. It also makes a lot more sense.
People aren’t showing up because they suddenly became deeply invested in an alternative rulebook for baseball. They’re showing up because they know they’ll get a story out of it. Something weird. Something fun. Something their kids will talk about in the car afterward.
The product became bigger than the game.
Here’s how I’d teach it
I’d put four words on the board:
Reduce. Remove. Raise. Create.
Then I’d ask students to figure out what the Bananas changed.
They reduced waiting, dead time, seriousness, and passive watching. They removed things like mound visits and bunting. They raised energy, participation, surprise, personality, and pace.
And they created something traditional baseball wasn’t really built to deliver every night: a live entertainment experience where the crowd is part of the product.
That’s what I like about this case.
It gets students out of the trap of thinking innovation always means adding more stuff.
Sometimes the smarter move is getting rid of the things everybody else assumes have to stay. Once they see that, I’d give them another category.
Maybe banking. Maybe gyms. Maybe museums. Maybe dental offices. Maybe college advising, if you’d like the class discussion to become unexpectedly personal.
Then I’d ask one question:
What are customers putting up with simply because nobody has given them another option?
That’s when the room usually gets interesting. Because now they’re not analyzing the Savannah Bananas anymore. They’re learning how to see a category.
The weird connection I really like
This is also where Cirque du Soleil comes in.
Traditional circuses competed with animals, clowns, ringmasters, tents, and spectacle.
Cirque didn’t come along and say, “We are going to make a 15% better circus.”
They changed the experience.
They removed animals. They raised the theatrical production. They added original music. They made the whole thing feel closer to premium live theater.
At some point, “circus” became too small a word for what they were selling.
That’s basically what happened with the Bananas.
Cirque du Soleil took the circus out of the circus category.
The Savannah Bananas took baseball out of the baseball category.
Different worlds. Same basic move.
When the old category starts limiting what customers can imagine, maybe the answer isn’t to win the category.
Maybe it’s to change it.
That’s the line I’d put on the board.
Assuming my handwriting is cooperating that day.
Want to teach this?
I built the full Savannah Bananas Category Creation Kit around this lesson.
It’s the version you can actually walk into class with.
The kit has the 50-minute lesson plan, slide outline, classroom activity, discussion questions, assignment, student handout, instructor notes, and sources. Basically, all the stuff that takes way longer to build than we tell ourselves it will.
And since this is the first Marketing Everywhere kit, I’m making it free.
Use it. Change it. Take the parts that work for your class and ignore the parts that don’t.
That’s what I’d do.
Next time
We’re sticking with the Savannah Bananas for one more lesson.
Changing the game got people’s attention. But getting people through the door is only part of it. The Bananas also had to figure out how to make the whole experience feel different, from the first interaction to the ride home.
So next time, we’re talking about Fans First and what the Bananas can teach us about customer experience.
Because saying you care about customers is easy; building the experience around them is a lot harder.