What the Savannah Banana’s taught me about trust (and getting it wrong)
Trust Issues — Edition 2
Would you trust a stranger in a Facebook group with your ticket money?
Normally, that’s a hell no. You don’t know this person. There’s no buyer protection. You’re basically hoping they’re not a scammer.But I did it recently. Didn’t even hesitate.
I’m obsessed with the Savannah Bananas, our whole family is. My 10-year-old son got us hooked, and now we’re full-blown Banana Heads. I’m a paying member of their fan club (shout-out K-Clubbers), and there’s a Facebook group where members buy and sell tickets to each other. Just regular people, no middleman, no guarantees. When I needed to sell some tickets, I posted them, a stranger sent me money, and that was that. Easy peasy.
And I realized afterward: I would not have done that for any other brand on the planet.
Not for my favorite pro team. Not for a concert I was dying to see. I would have gone through StubHub, or Ticketmaster, or some platform with fraud protection. But for the Bananas? I trusted a stranger in a Facebook group. And the stranger trusted me.
That’s when my marketer brain kicked in. What this company has built isn’t brand loyalty. It’s something way deeper than that.
If you’ve never heard of the Savannah Bananas, here’s the short version
They’re a baseball team out of Savannah, Georgia, that plays a made-up, fast-paced version of baseball called Banana Ball. Players do choreographed dances, wear kilts, do backflips catching fly balls. Fans can get batters out by catching foul balls in the stands. It’s part baseball, part circus, part Broadway show. They’ve been called the Harlem Globetrotters of baseball, but honestly, that undersells it. In 2025, they sold out 18 MLB stadiums, drew 81,000 people to a single game at Clemson’s football stadium, and Forbes estimates the organization is worth about $500 million. Their ticket waitlist is over 3.9 million people. All of this from a team that started in 2016 with an empty stadium and a pile of debt.
But I’m not writing about them because the numbers are wild, even though they are. I’m writing about them because what they’ve built explains something that I talk to CEOs about quite a bit and that a lot of companies are getting wrong.
Trust is a buffer for imperfection
Here’s the thing about the Bananas that doesn’t make it into the marketing case studies: they screw up. Regularly.
They’re always trying new things. New rules, new game formats, new crowd interactions. Sometimes the website crashes during a ticket lottery. Sometimes a new bit falls flat. Sometimes the logistics of a 40-city tour just… don’t work perfectly. They are not a flawless operation.
But when something goes wrong, their fans don’t riot. They don’t leave one-star reviews. They don’t blast them on social media. They assume the Bananas are going to make it right.
And the Bananas always do.
Their ethos is Fans First. Their co-owner Jesse Cole (he and his wife Emily own the league outright) literally wrote the book on it, it’s called Fans First, highly recommend, and they live and breathe that mentality in ways that would make most executives break into a sweat.
Their fan club is paid. But if the schedule comes out and you can’t make your game? Full refund. No questions. Just: we get it, here’s your money back. Fans First.
They’ve turned down millions in broadcast deals because they refuse to give up streaming all their games for free on YouTube. Millions of dollars. Left on the table. Because putting games behind a paywall would mean some fans can’t watch. Fans first.
And they just built their own Fans First Ticket Marketplace, a verified resale portal where fans can sell tickets they can’t use at face value only. No markups. No scalper fees. Why? Because scalpers were selling their $35 tickets for hundreds of dollars, and families were showing up to games with fake tickets and getting turned away at the gate. Jesse said it kills him every time he sees it. So instead of shrugging and saying “that’s the secondary market,” they built a whole platform to fix it. Fans freaking first.
They send players and performers up to the nosebleed seats so that every fan, not just the ones in the expensive seats, gets a VIP-level experience. I was at Camden Yards with my daughter last year. Three rows from the top. And she still got to meet Princess Potassia (yes, there is a Princess of Bananaland, and yes, she is exactly as delightful as that sounds). Most organizations would focus their energy on the premium seats. The Bananas send the show to the cheap seats. Fans first.
I’ve watched the fan community when something goes wrong. Someone has a bad experience, and instead of outrage, the response is basically: “Yeah, that stinks, but they’ll fix it. They always do.”
Do you know how rare that is? Think about the last time something went wrong with a brand you buy from. Did you give them the benefit of the doubt? Or did you go straight to Google to find an alternative?
Most companies are terrified of trying anything new because they’re afraid of what happens when it doesn’t work. The Bananas can take real creative risks, constantly, and the trust they’ve built acts as a buffer. Their fans give them room to be imperfect. And that room is what lets them keep getting better.
That’s not something you can buy with a quick campaign. You earn it. And the way they earned it is worth understanding.
What “fans first” looks like when you actually mean it
It’s easy to put “customer first” on your website. I've sat in many a room where organizations are customer-first, only if it's the most profitable choice for their shareholders. The Bananas are so interesting because they actually live that ethos, and it costs them something.
Tickets at their home stadium include all food and drinks. No $14 beers. No nickel-and-diming. That’s real revenue they’re leaving on the table because pay-point friction tells a fan they’re a revenue source, not a guest.
In the early days, Cole and his team personally called every single ticket buyer. Over 100,000 phone calls. They handwrote thank-you notes after merchandise purchases. They still send 'hand-written' emails after games.
Their email open rate is over 55%, nearly triple the national average. Because they never send emails to sell. They send emails to entertain, inform, and thank. That’s it. When your audience knows that every time they open something from you, it’s going to be worth their time? They open it.
Their social media team’s explicit goal, and I love this, isn’t conversion. It’s to “pique curiosity, chase smiles, and give people something to talk about.” Their feeds have zero “buy now” calls to action. They have over 10.5 million TikTok followers, more than MLB’s official account, and they’ve never once used that audience to push a sale.
The result? When the ticket lottery opens, the demand is explosive. Because it’s been building for months or years through emotional connection with no strings attached.
As a marketer, this is the part that gets me. Most companies do the exact opposite. They gate their best content. They optimize every post for conversion. They treat every interaction like a step in a funnel. And then they wonder why their audience feels transactional. The Bananas give everything away and their audience is begging to give them money.
What this means if you’re not a baseball team
“Okay Becca, but they’re an entertainment brand. That’s different.” I hear you, but no, it’s not.
The Bananas didn’t start as an entertainment brand. They started as a broke baseball team that nobody cared about, in a small city that had already given up on them. They became an entertainment brand because they made one decision: the fan’s experience matters more than our convenience.
That decision is available to you right now.
Think about the friction in your customer’s experience. The pricing page that requires a demo request before anyone can see a number. The support ticket that takes 48 hours. The onboarding email that reads like it was written by legal. The invoice that feels like a shakedown. Every single one of those is a trust decision. And your customers are keeping score, even if they’re not telling you about it.
The Bananas ask one question before every decision: “Will this create a fan?” Not a customer.
A fan.
A fan refers you without being asked. A fan defends you when a competitor shows up. A fan stays through a price increase. A fan trusts a stranger in a Facebook group because of how you made them feel.
What question does your team ask before every decision? If you don’t have one, that’s the gap.
So what do you actually do with this?
Run a friction audit. Map every touchpoint a customer has with your company—every email, every call, every invoice, every login screen. For each one, ask: does this serve us or does this serve them? Be brutally honest. Cole photographed his empty seats. You need to find your version of that.
Give away your best stuff. The Bananas’ entire content strategy is built on providing value with no strings attached. Your version might be ungating that guide, sharing your real methodology instead of teasing it, or writing the honest take on your industry instead of the safe one. Trust is built in the moments when you could have extracted value and chose not to.
Make unexpected moments fun, even invoices. I’m stealing this directly from Jesse Cole and I’m not sorry. He said “Every pay point shouldn’t be a pain point. We even make our invoices fun.” Your transactional communications, invoices, renewal emails, support responses, are either reinforcing that you care, or reminding people you don’t. Most companies have never even thought about it.
Build the buffer before you need it. The Bananas can take risks and make mistakes because they’ve already banked so much trust. If you wait until something goes wrong to start building trust with your customers, it’s too late. The buffer has to exist before the crisis.
The question to ask your team this week
Pick one thing your company does that exists because it’s easier for you, not better for the customer. Then ask: “What would it cost us to fix this? And what is it already costing us to keep it?”
The Savannah Bananas didn’t build a $500 million brand by being louder than everyone else. They built it by caring more, at every touchpoint, than anyone thought was reasonable.
They built something most brands never will: trust so deep that when things break, their fans don’t leave. They wait. Because they’ve seen what happens next.
Your customers can tell the difference between a company that says “customer first” and one that means it. They’ve always been able to tell.
Parting thoughts: The companies that treat every customer interaction as an opportunity to build loyalty instead of extract revenue are outperforming the ones still optimizing for conversions. The hard part isn’t knowing this. It’s reorganizing your operations around it. Start with the friction audit. Everything else follows from there.
If you've made it this far, please enjoy our family halloween costume. Halloween is my Super Bowl and this was my favorite costume yet
Trust Issues is a newsletter about why your marketing isn’t building the trust your business needs, and what to do about it. Real talk for CEOs tired of tactics that don’t stick.
