James Forrest
The Emperor of Ice Cream
This morning, Paulina put up an outstanding piece, absolutely outstanding, on our continued silence, and Celtic’s lack of communication over the last few weeks. It echoed some of what I have said before about what happens when Celtic does not communicate properly.
Other people fill the silence.
This is a commonly recognised phenomenon, not just across football but across politics, media and business. If you are not communicating properly with your customers, your voters or your supporters, other people will fill the hole.
We live in an information age. People want constant information, and it is not always fair that they do. I’m going to give you an example.
I am a gamer in my spare time. I like strategy games, and there are three companies whose products I almost always buy;
Frontier Developments, who make the tycoon and Planet games, such as Planet Zoo and Planet Coaster. Paradox Interactive, who make games like Crusader Kings 3, Hearts of Iron and Cities: Skylines 2, and Creative Assembly, who make the Total War titles.
Frontier’s current big project is the Jurassic World Evolution series. They are on their third iteration now, easily the best one. But for two whole months, they did not release any meaningful information about updates, patches or future DLC.
Players had been waiting for a proper content drop for a while, and there was nothing. Then a week or so ago Frontier released a tiny statement saying matters beyond their control had delayed the next major update, but that satisfied nobody.
In the information gap, speculation went rampant. People wondered whether the game would ever be updated again. The community filled in the blanks.
Frontier finally released an update two days ago, but there are still many questions about what comes next which they have not answered. But the silence has been broken and the game got some additional content.
Creative Assembly went through the same thing with Warhammer 3. They went nearly a year without releasing DLC for that game, and throughout that spell the speculation and frustration ran wild.
Paradox, on the other hand, communicates all the time. Whether it is the Hearts of Iron community or the Crusader Kings community, they release dev diaries, regular patches and public betas which allow players to test features before they go live.
In communication terms, they are a completely different company from the other two. That is what the modern audience expects.
Some of it I find very entitled. If you have ever been on a video-game Reddit or forum, you will know exactly what I mean. These people can be bonkers even compared to football fans, and that is saying something.
But a lot of it is just people who have put time and money into something they enjoy asking for more information about when that thing is going to improve, be fixed or expand. That is why Frontier are now throwing freebies at their community. It is why Creative Assembly reworked its entire communication strategy and threw in freebies of its own. It is why people keep buying Paradox games over and over again.
Because at least with Paradox, you usually know what is going on. Even when they release something that doesn’t quite impress people, they listen to feedback, they correct errors and bad features with patches. They get it.
Celtic need a complete reset of our communication strategy as a club.
Supporters have paid a lot of money. They have invested a lot of time, emotion and effort. If anyone thinks companies stop caring once they have your money, they are not even close to understanding how this works.
These companies want to sell you the next version of the game. They want to sell you DLC. They want an engaged community which is on board with the product, because anything else is a disaster.
Creative Assembly learned that the hard way.
It released one poor DLC for one of its flagship titles, Three Kingdoms.
Fans hated it and did not buy it. But the company made one very big assumption: that players who loved the game, and who wanted better-quality DLC in the future, would eventually hold their noses, accept the inferior product and pay for it rather than see development mothballed altogether, which is what they threatened to do.
They were wrong. Even fans who adored Three Kingdoms were not going to be coerced like that. They were not going to reward bad content under threat, even if the threat turned out to be credible, which it did. They were not going to buy something they did not want simply because the alternative was the company axing further development.
That must have come as a major shock to the executives.
Because the fans called the bluff. They did not buy the DLC. Further development of the game was halted. The company lost out on millions. Fans lost out on further content. Nobody won, but the fury over that decision was off the charts. It impacted almost everything Creative Assembly did for the next two years.
When the company later announced Pharaoh: Total War as a full-price title, almost nobody bought it as the anger from the Three Kingdoms rage burned on.
In the end, Creative Assembly was forced to release the planned DLCs for Pharoh for nothing as part of a massive upgrade which added regions to the campaign map and factions, both playable and non-playable. Then, when fans still wouldn’t pay top dollar for it, they brought that game to a conclusion too, having once planned years of content for it.
Fans brought two games to a complete standstill and even forced a major upgrade to one of them before the company moved on.
That was the Total War community’s version of Not Another Penny.
The message was simple: you have our money for the base games. You have our money for Three Kingdoms, Warhammer 3 and everything else in our libraries. You can keep that. But you will not get any more until you get a grip, make restitution and change.
Celtic believes it has us forever.
It believes that once supporters have bought season tickets, they have no leverage left. But that is not true, and the club itself must know it is not true.
Fans always have choices. We can decide not to attend cup games at Celtic Park. We can decide to keep the Not Another Penny campaign going when it comes to merchandise and matchday spending.
In short, we do not have to buy their DLC.
But it is more than that.
What really brought Creative Assembly back to the table was pressure. Negative reviews. Negative feedback. An entire community of online content creators spending all day, every day making videos about how unprofessional the company’s behaviour was and urging fans to boycott the products until they knew they’d get good value next time. It was that wave of pressure, day after day, which brought things to a head.
Little by little, they chipped holes in the dam.
Don’t forget this; these online player communities were going up against gigantic, global software companies whose revenues make Celtic look like a corner shop, and even they were pushed into better communication strategies and structural fixes because of pressure from their customer bases.
Sooner or later, Celtic supporters, both organised groups and the wider fan base, will find where this club’s real pressure points are. We are going to hit them as hard as we can, and this board will scramble, because this board has no idea how to fix its structural problems and no wish to communicate better.
They have hired this customer-service guy. I do not want to insult him, although I know that is not his official job title. But essentially, that is what he has been brought in to do: to be the public-facing person when it comes to talking to supporters.
Here is what the club will not admit outright.
If you ask that guy about strategy, if you ask him what is going on inside the club, if you ask him to fill in the blanks on signings or major hirings at the very top of the club, on which the future of Celtic depends, he will not be able to answer.
So, the really important information will still be kept from us.
Still at arm’s length.
Later on, I am going to write about Celtic Supporters Limited and the one argument I have with them in relation to the document they released last week, in which they discussed what they call the Celtic Paradox.
I thought it was a fantastic piece of work. People know I am sceptical when it comes to Celtic Supporters Limited and their overall strategy, and that is the part I am going to argue with. But in terms of presenting a clear and coherent case on what is wrong with Celtic at a governance level, I think it is a document without parallel so far.
I cannot congratulate them enough on that.
They talk about communications both directly and indirectly. When they compare Celtic to clubs like Benfica and Ajax, they discuss how those clubs have multi-year strategies, how those strategies are published and then graded every season to make sure they are on track.
When Celtic fans have asked this club to produce a strategy document and show it to them, the club has refused. That is one of the most fundamental responsibilities an organisation owes its shareholders and customer base, and Celtic refuse to do it.
Yet even gaming companies produce annual roadmaps for new releases. When Creative Assembly releases a new title, it puts up a multi-year roadmap of intended releases and major feature patches. Paradox is the best in the business at mapping out a game’s development cycle and they keep players informed at every stage.
One of the flagship brands under their flag is the Cities: Skylines franchise. Skylines 2 came out about three years ago and was a mess of epic proportions. The main studio behind it, Colossal Order, were relieved of their control earlier this year, a new studio called Iceflake put in charge instead and now patches and new information are flowing out in a steady stream. The game has won back a lot of its goodwill.
What Skylines 2 proves is that the roadblock does not always go according to plan. Of course it doesn’t. But that first basic piece of communication is critical in building trust and accountability, because when they fail to meet a specific goal outlined in the roadmap, they get some flak. And then they have to make changes.
There is nothing wrong with that. It is called basic accountability, and the decision Paradox took to remove Colossal Order – who created the Skylines games in the first place – was both ruthless and necessary because that’s how you restore trust in the system. You make people responsible for their mistakes.
Accountability is another thing Celtic appear not to think we deserve.
But as Paulina said earlier, the silence is the real problem.
A proper communication strategy would provide real information and stop a lot of the speculation swirling about this club stone dead.
We have made a mess of the start of the summer, and there are no two ways about that. I do not care how many board apologists or people tired of negativity crawl out of the woodwork to tell us to pipe down.
We care about this club. We want it run properly.
Those same people were saying exactly the same thing this time last year when our concerns were being outlined. As it turned out, every one of those concerns was justified. They are no less justified here.
Celtic have had six months to talk to managers, sound out good coaches and come up with a comprehensive plan for what they want to do with the football department. Here we are with a shortlist of two that most people already guessed at, because it represents everything this club has done wrong over the years.
It is parochial. It is small thinking. It is lazy.
Because it is all those things, it reveals this board again as absolutely incompetent and unfit to run a major institution.
There are two reasons why a major organisation does not communicate.
Either it is doing something it does not want people to know about, or it does not know what it is doing. Neither of those is good.
The first is only marginally worse than the second.
In everything Celtic do, they amplify the idea that these people do not have a clue and the warning about what that leads to lies outside football, in the way customers at Frontier, Creative Assembly and other major software companies have, little by little, forced them to change and get better at what they do.
If Celtic will not learn these lessons willingly, then this customer base is only going to get angrier and more determined to force the change these people will not voluntarily embrace.
Choose The CelticBlog as a ‘Preferred Source’ on Google News for quick access to the news you value.
The post Celtic will learn the hard way that silence and contempt is not a strategy. appeared first on The Celtic Blog.
Continue reading...
Other people fill the silence.
This is a commonly recognised phenomenon, not just across football but across politics, media and business. If you are not communicating properly with your customers, your voters or your supporters, other people will fill the hole.
We live in an information age. People want constant information, and it is not always fair that they do. I’m going to give you an example.
I am a gamer in my spare time. I like strategy games, and there are three companies whose products I almost always buy;
Frontier Developments, who make the tycoon and Planet games, such as Planet Zoo and Planet Coaster. Paradox Interactive, who make games like Crusader Kings 3, Hearts of Iron and Cities: Skylines 2, and Creative Assembly, who make the Total War titles.
Frontier’s current big project is the Jurassic World Evolution series. They are on their third iteration now, easily the best one. But for two whole months, they did not release any meaningful information about updates, patches or future DLC.
Players had been waiting for a proper content drop for a while, and there was nothing. Then a week or so ago Frontier released a tiny statement saying matters beyond their control had delayed the next major update, but that satisfied nobody.
In the information gap, speculation went rampant. People wondered whether the game would ever be updated again. The community filled in the blanks.
Frontier finally released an update two days ago, but there are still many questions about what comes next which they have not answered. But the silence has been broken and the game got some additional content.
Creative Assembly went through the same thing with Warhammer 3. They went nearly a year without releasing DLC for that game, and throughout that spell the speculation and frustration ran wild.
Paradox, on the other hand, communicates all the time. Whether it is the Hearts of Iron community or the Crusader Kings community, they release dev diaries, regular patches and public betas which allow players to test features before they go live.
In communication terms, they are a completely different company from the other two. That is what the modern audience expects.
Some of it I find very entitled. If you have ever been on a video-game Reddit or forum, you will know exactly what I mean. These people can be bonkers even compared to football fans, and that is saying something.
But a lot of it is just people who have put time and money into something they enjoy asking for more information about when that thing is going to improve, be fixed or expand. That is why Frontier are now throwing freebies at their community. It is why Creative Assembly reworked its entire communication strategy and threw in freebies of its own. It is why people keep buying Paradox games over and over again.
Because at least with Paradox, you usually know what is going on. Even when they release something that doesn’t quite impress people, they listen to feedback, they correct errors and bad features with patches. They get it.
Celtic need a complete reset of our communication strategy as a club.
Supporters have paid a lot of money. They have invested a lot of time, emotion and effort. If anyone thinks companies stop caring once they have your money, they are not even close to understanding how this works.
These companies want to sell you the next version of the game. They want to sell you DLC. They want an engaged community which is on board with the product, because anything else is a disaster.
Creative Assembly learned that the hard way.
It released one poor DLC for one of its flagship titles, Three Kingdoms.
Fans hated it and did not buy it. But the company made one very big assumption: that players who loved the game, and who wanted better-quality DLC in the future, would eventually hold their noses, accept the inferior product and pay for it rather than see development mothballed altogether, which is what they threatened to do.
They were wrong. Even fans who adored Three Kingdoms were not going to be coerced like that. They were not going to reward bad content under threat, even if the threat turned out to be credible, which it did. They were not going to buy something they did not want simply because the alternative was the company axing further development.
That must have come as a major shock to the executives.
Because the fans called the bluff. They did not buy the DLC. Further development of the game was halted. The company lost out on millions. Fans lost out on further content. Nobody won, but the fury over that decision was off the charts. It impacted almost everything Creative Assembly did for the next two years.
When the company later announced Pharaoh: Total War as a full-price title, almost nobody bought it as the anger from the Three Kingdoms rage burned on.
In the end, Creative Assembly was forced to release the planned DLCs for Pharoh for nothing as part of a massive upgrade which added regions to the campaign map and factions, both playable and non-playable. Then, when fans still wouldn’t pay top dollar for it, they brought that game to a conclusion too, having once planned years of content for it.
Fans brought two games to a complete standstill and even forced a major upgrade to one of them before the company moved on.
That was the Total War community’s version of Not Another Penny.
The message was simple: you have our money for the base games. You have our money for Three Kingdoms, Warhammer 3 and everything else in our libraries. You can keep that. But you will not get any more until you get a grip, make restitution and change.
Celtic believes it has us forever.
It believes that once supporters have bought season tickets, they have no leverage left. But that is not true, and the club itself must know it is not true.
Fans always have choices. We can decide not to attend cup games at Celtic Park. We can decide to keep the Not Another Penny campaign going when it comes to merchandise and matchday spending.
In short, we do not have to buy their DLC.
But it is more than that.
What really brought Creative Assembly back to the table was pressure. Negative reviews. Negative feedback. An entire community of online content creators spending all day, every day making videos about how unprofessional the company’s behaviour was and urging fans to boycott the products until they knew they’d get good value next time. It was that wave of pressure, day after day, which brought things to a head.
Little by little, they chipped holes in the dam.
Don’t forget this; these online player communities were going up against gigantic, global software companies whose revenues make Celtic look like a corner shop, and even they were pushed into better communication strategies and structural fixes because of pressure from their customer bases.
Sooner or later, Celtic supporters, both organised groups and the wider fan base, will find where this club’s real pressure points are. We are going to hit them as hard as we can, and this board will scramble, because this board has no idea how to fix its structural problems and no wish to communicate better.
They have hired this customer-service guy. I do not want to insult him, although I know that is not his official job title. But essentially, that is what he has been brought in to do: to be the public-facing person when it comes to talking to supporters.
Here is what the club will not admit outright.
If you ask that guy about strategy, if you ask him what is going on inside the club, if you ask him to fill in the blanks on signings or major hirings at the very top of the club, on which the future of Celtic depends, he will not be able to answer.
So, the really important information will still be kept from us.
Still at arm’s length.
Later on, I am going to write about Celtic Supporters Limited and the one argument I have with them in relation to the document they released last week, in which they discussed what they call the Celtic Paradox.
I thought it was a fantastic piece of work. People know I am sceptical when it comes to Celtic Supporters Limited and their overall strategy, and that is the part I am going to argue with. But in terms of presenting a clear and coherent case on what is wrong with Celtic at a governance level, I think it is a document without parallel so far.
I cannot congratulate them enough on that.
They talk about communications both directly and indirectly. When they compare Celtic to clubs like Benfica and Ajax, they discuss how those clubs have multi-year strategies, how those strategies are published and then graded every season to make sure they are on track.
When Celtic fans have asked this club to produce a strategy document and show it to them, the club has refused. That is one of the most fundamental responsibilities an organisation owes its shareholders and customer base, and Celtic refuse to do it.
Yet even gaming companies produce annual roadmaps for new releases. When Creative Assembly releases a new title, it puts up a multi-year roadmap of intended releases and major feature patches. Paradox is the best in the business at mapping out a game’s development cycle and they keep players informed at every stage.
One of the flagship brands under their flag is the Cities: Skylines franchise. Skylines 2 came out about three years ago and was a mess of epic proportions. The main studio behind it, Colossal Order, were relieved of their control earlier this year, a new studio called Iceflake put in charge instead and now patches and new information are flowing out in a steady stream. The game has won back a lot of its goodwill.
What Skylines 2 proves is that the roadblock does not always go according to plan. Of course it doesn’t. But that first basic piece of communication is critical in building trust and accountability, because when they fail to meet a specific goal outlined in the roadmap, they get some flak. And then they have to make changes.
There is nothing wrong with that. It is called basic accountability, and the decision Paradox took to remove Colossal Order – who created the Skylines games in the first place – was both ruthless and necessary because that’s how you restore trust in the system. You make people responsible for their mistakes.
Accountability is another thing Celtic appear not to think we deserve.
But as Paulina said earlier, the silence is the real problem.
A proper communication strategy would provide real information and stop a lot of the speculation swirling about this club stone dead.
We have made a mess of the start of the summer, and there are no two ways about that. I do not care how many board apologists or people tired of negativity crawl out of the woodwork to tell us to pipe down.
We care about this club. We want it run properly.
Those same people were saying exactly the same thing this time last year when our concerns were being outlined. As it turned out, every one of those concerns was justified. They are no less justified here.
Celtic have had six months to talk to managers, sound out good coaches and come up with a comprehensive plan for what they want to do with the football department. Here we are with a shortlist of two that most people already guessed at, because it represents everything this club has done wrong over the years.
It is parochial. It is small thinking. It is lazy.
Because it is all those things, it reveals this board again as absolutely incompetent and unfit to run a major institution.
There are two reasons why a major organisation does not communicate.
Either it is doing something it does not want people to know about, or it does not know what it is doing. Neither of those is good.
The first is only marginally worse than the second.
In everything Celtic do, they amplify the idea that these people do not have a clue and the warning about what that leads to lies outside football, in the way customers at Frontier, Creative Assembly and other major software companies have, little by little, forced them to change and get better at what they do.
If Celtic will not learn these lessons willingly, then this customer base is only going to get angrier and more determined to force the change these people will not voluntarily embrace.
Choose The CelticBlog as a ‘Preferred Source’ on Google News for quick access to the news you value.
The post Celtic will learn the hard way that silence and contempt is not a strategy. appeared first on The Celtic Blog.
Continue reading...
