I profoundly apologize for the long gap between blog posts. Life intervened.

A lot’s happened in the interregnum, but what’s most important is what didn’t happen. No one in my immediate family got COVID, and I didn’t lose my business. I'm pleased and relieved to state that coming out of the pandemic, Polymath Research + Marketing is still a going concern.

For that, there’s a lot of thanks to go around: to our clients, who stuck with us even when things got really dicey; to our colleagues, who recommended our services and shared work as best they could; and to our families, who contributed moral support and so much more.

Still, as the pandemic began I had genuine fear that we wouldn’t survive, mainly because I had already lost one business to catastrophe.

C.C. West Consulting helped sports-card manufacturers and other prospective pro-sports licensees develop products, secure licenses, and market their licensed products, and worked with licensors like Major League Baseball to help maintain equilibrium in the collectibles markets.

It was a good business, and fun, and went along fine … until 9/11.

People forget this detail, but 9/11 effectively ended the first sports-collectibles boom. After the planes hit the towers, no one wanted anything as frivolous as a baseball card. The market contracted, the speculators moved on, and the few manufacturers in the space pulled their marketing dollars, leaving C.C. West Consulting high and dry.

That’s what got me into insurance. It wasn’t the glamor or the adrenaline rush; it was the paycheck.

And sports cards? A lot of average Jills and Joes wound up with cases of 1992 Donruss baseball cards holding up the walls in their basements.

This is all a long preamble to the actual subject of my blog, which is the gobsmacking revival of the sports-collectibles market.

In case you missed it, trading cards are going bonkers, led by “modern vintage” stuff like the 1979-80 O-Pee-Chee Wayne Gretzky rookie card, which recently sold for $3.7 million.

(I had one. I got it in a $15 hockey-card assortment, and sold it for a couple hundred bucks to help buy our first house. I don’t regret it for an instant. It’s a crummy picture on crappy cardboard made by a company with the most inane business name in North America, and while the guy who dropped $3.7 million on one probably has a buyer lined up willing to drop $5.8 mill, it’s still a sucker bet.)

It’s not just The Great One. Cards of everyone from Tom Brady to Wander Franco (he of the zero major-league at-bats) have been selling for six- and seven-digit sums, with no decimal places involved. Grading services – where cards are evaluated, scored, and put in tamper-proof plastic, the better to sell as commodities – are experiencing six-month backlogs, scuffles are breaking out in the aisles of Target over the latest Pokémon shipment, and manufacturers like Topps are cranking up the presses like they haven’t done in decades.

And this doesn’t even take into account the bat-crap-crazy stuff like self-styled celebrity and “boxer” Jake Paul wearing a Charizard card around his neck into his “fight” with Floyd Mayweather and afterwards declaring the card worth a million smackers.

What in the name of Todd Van Poppel is going on?

It’s a bubble, obviously, perpetrated by people who’ve never come within 100 miles of the George Santayana School of Marketing (where those who don’t remember the past are condemned to repeat it).

Like a lot of bubbles, including the recently popped bubble for non-fungible tokens (NFTs), the Second Great Trading-Card Bubble operates like a snowball rolling downhill, using its own momentum to help it grow in size and ferocity. If you get in at the top of the hill when it’s just a pebble, you do well; get in at the bottom and you get crushed.

There are important marketing lessons to be found in the sports-collectibles bubble, not the least of which is the proper spelling of “collectibles.”

Now, let’s see what you can learn (or relearn) from the bubble, and how it can help you market more effectively.

Never underestimate the power of bored consumers with money.

Under normal circumstances, a boom in trading cards would have been highly unlikely.

However, people who did not lose their jobs during the pandemic found themselves with surplus time and money, and they reacted strangely yet predictably. They gardened, baked, knitted, read real books … and took up with collectibles again.

That manifested itself in some truly odd ways, like a surge in demand for bad comic books such as the much-reviled, Todd McFarlane-penned Spider-Man #1, but it also resulted in stupid money chasing after top-end trading cards.

The lesson is that a consumer with spending power is probably going to spend, and if they don’t have something definite to spend it on, they’re going to opt for something convenient that makes them feel good.

How can a marketer take advantage of that? Look at spending patterns. Are there signs of discretionary income being spent willy-nilly – or not being spent at all? Maybe it’s apartment dwellers temporarily pivoting from their dream of home ownership to a vintage McIntosh stereo system, or tail-end Boomers dropping serious coin on a Mercedes camper-van.

People with money to spend will find a way to spend that money. Now, what do you have that will interest them?

Impressions trump reality every day of the week.

The impression is that contemporary sports cards are somehow scarce. Truth is, print runs are at 20-year highs.

So how can people be convinced that something is scarce when in reality it’s not? The power of anecdotal information.

Thousands of Wayne Gretzky rookie cards were printed, but one sold for $3.7 million. Why? It was in incredible condition, and it hit the market at the right time.

Even if you had a Gretzky rookie odds are you wouldn’t see that kind of money because:

It’s probably not in the same condition; and
The moment’s passed.

Conversely, the big-money contemporary cards that made headlines, like Brady and Franco, were genuinely scarce cards that were incredibly hard to get – sort of like winning the lottery.

When I was in sports marketing I came up with Kiefer’s First Law of Collectibles, which goes: If it’s valuable, how come you got it? Chances are what you have is the common version, in sub-optimal condition, or both.

If everyone had a $3.7 million card in their collection, it wouldn’t be news. And it wouldn’t be worth $3.7 million.

Time moves on, but Kiefer’s First Law still holds.

“Thin but everywhere” is still a viable distribution strategy.

The first time through the order, we encouraged our sports-card clients to adopt a “thin but everywhere” strategy, meaning: get limited quantities of your product out to as many locations as possible, so when it sells out, people will think it’s scarce.

This is actually a great marketing strategy, and it’s used all the time, most recently by Harley-Davidson.

The company recently released its Pan America multi-terrain bike. As Jalopnik reports:

It’s a kickass bike with some super cool tech and competitive features for a competitive price. It might be the first time Harley managed to get all four of those things to be true about the same motorcycle. And, as it turns out, that’s exactly what customers wanted from the brand, because dealerships can’t keep the damn things on the showroom floor.

… there’s no production limit for the Pan America beyond the speed at which the assembly line can produce them. For the most part, if you order one, you’ll get it … Every one of Harley’s 681 North American dealerships will be receiving at least two bikes each in a pre-written launch plan, and dealers have been taking pre-orders for any bikes beyond that.

Thin but everywhere. It works. It gets the product in as many hands as possible across the country, it creates the impression of limited availability, goosing demand still further, and it encourages your customers to do your marketing for you.

Topps, Panini et al. are doing a baseline amount of marketing right now. They basically have to say, “Hey, it’s out,” and consumers take it from there.

You can’t buy that level of marketing effectiveness. That’s what thin-but-everywhere can do for you.

Channel-specific marketing has legs.

This is thin-but-everywhere’s ugly stepsister. Hand-in-hand with the previous strategy, unique channel-specific product configurations have been used by trading-card manufacturers for the last 30 years to amplify demand and build customer base across multiple verticals.

They started because Sam’s Club demanded something special, and Target demanded something special, and K Mart (remember them?), and then hobby shops said, “we’re the backbone of the business – give us something,” and before you knew it there were eight different product configurations meant to be J-hooked, blister-packed, sold on an endcap, or just stuck in display boxes on a shelf.

A product that’s in demand is going to sell even if it’s encased in dung, but if you’re looking to build a business, channel-specific configurations can help build long-term customers, even when logic suggests they’d abandon you.

Given the hand they were dealt, every hobby shop in the country should have gone belly-up, but they didn’t. Channel-specific packouts were one reason why.

Get in early, or don’t get in at all.

This has applications in every phase of marketing from product development to social media. If you’re joining the conversation on Twitter, don’t wait for legal to clear the tweet before saying something. By the time you get the okay, the crowd will have moved on to the next uproar du jour and you’ll just wind up looking pathetic.

Similarly, the last chicken sandwich to join the war will probably be the first to leave the battlefield. (Sorry, Chili’s.)

The corollary lesson is that you don’t have to join every battle or every conversation. If you can’t be there at the right time, it’s okay not to be there at all. It’s probably not good business to let every opportunity pass, but there’s generally little to be gained by raising your hand after the teacher’s called on someone else.

Whatever you do, never expect consumers to remember what happened the last time.

Yeah, it ended badly. It ended very badly. But that was a long time ago.

Consumer and political behavior over the last year-plus has shown that people forget things shockingly quickly. And because they forget things quickly, they make the same mistakes again and again.

Anyone with a scintilla of knowledge of the collectibles markets of the 1990s could have told you that NFTs were going to sputter and fizzle like a 50-cent bottle rocket. And they’ll tell you that anyone who’s even a minute late to the latest trading-card party is going to wind up with cases of cardboard serving as seepage remediation in their basement.

H.L. Mencken said that no one ever lost money underestimating the intelligence of the American public. Well, no one lost money underestimating the ability of the American public to remember they got burned 10 minutes ago by the very same thing.

I'm not saying this as an excuse to legitimize Amway or forgive all the electric-vehicle startups who were selling vaporware. I'm saying this because while marketers may have long memories, consumers, as a rule, don’t.

I mean, they’re bringing back Saw movies, Doogie Howser, and the USFL. What more proof do you need?

Personally, I never thought the sports-card industry would come back, and it’s back. That says something, but I'm not sure what it is, and I'm not sure it’s positive.

However, considering the alternatives, I'd rather have a world where Gretzky rookie cards are making headlines by selling for millions than a world where that’s the furthest thing from people’s minds.

Stay strong, everyone.

The Power Of Bored Money, And Other Marketing Lessons From The Trading-Card Boom