At some point, every week, I am rudely interrupted by someone in my office. I could be eating a spoonful of yoghurt, walking into a meeting, talking to a client or using the toilet. It won’t matter. Ever since they learned of its existence, my colleagues always need to know, with great urgency, whether I’ve booked the pickleball court or not.
Pickleball has a reputation for besetting this kind of mania upon people. Particularly since the incursion of Covid-19 in the 2020s. Turns out, this inelegant game with a silly name was the perfect remedy for a world facing a pandemic. * But how does that make sense? How did this sport get such a chokehold on the zeitgeist?
As people in the business of working out how trends happen (and in the midst of its own picklemania), here’s what we think went down:
Pickleball was sociable, convenient and exciting. During a time when members of the public were isolated from each other, pickleball appeared in car parks, community centres and sports halls to offer somewhere to come together at a safe social distance. The court’s just the right size – big enough to have your own space, small enough to hold a conversation.
It was pretty simple to pick up, too. Within about thirty minutes, a complete beginner could have a rally going with someone. The pace of the game comes down to who you play. You might not break a sweat, or you might get a workout in. The barriers to entry are very low, but there’s a pretty high skill ceiling. And that’s always appealing to newbies.
We (Brands, Businesses, 17-year-old Entrepreneurs) all want to be like pickleball. It was the fastest growing sport in the world before padel. That’s a kind of magic we’d all like a part of. So, what practical lessons can we take? Well, lightning in a bottle like that doesn’t happen naturally – you’ve got to trap it first. So, first thing you need to do is wait for a storm.
Every fad, every trend, communicates with a specific historical moment. It might align itself, like panic buying does with times of war. Or it might exist as an antidote, like pickleball was for the pandemic. Labubus ride the cultural explosion of East-Asian pop-culture, chess clubs open as treatments for deteriorating attention spans and rising isolationism.
That’s your lightning. Being in the right place to spot it is one thing, trapping and bottling it is a whole different story. Fortunately for you, as a marketing agency, that’s sort of our job. And we’re not about to tell you exactly how we do that on a blog, are we? You’ll have to come in for a chat — maybe over a game of pickleball? I just so happen to know about 50 people who’d join you.
*I will not dwell on whether there is a parallel between the restrictions of Covid-19 motivating a mass escape into pickleball and office-dwellers finding an equivalent enthusiasm for the game.
