Clinical Associate Professor of Marketing Peter Johnson

The following is an computer-generated summary of the video transcript.

Hi, I'm Professor Peter johnson here at the Gabelli School of Business at Fordham University. I want to talk to you about some recent research that we did that involves the Fordham women's softball team and aspects of their play that include ritual and superstition and even magic. So let me tell you a little bit about what we found about ritual and superstition. You have to follow certain behaviors and ritual involves repetition. We saw a lot of that with game after game in our women's softball team. These types of rituals varied all the way from songs that are sung together to hand gestures to special handshakes that the players had to recognize and to reward and to motivate each other. Let me give you a quick example Any time there was a 2-2, count all of the players in the dugout would go in twos and they would tap on the side of the dugout to and to always with twos. It was definitely a ritual that these young athletes did. Ritual and magic and superstition all very interesting in a sports context. What does this have to do with marketing and business? Well, we found there were two important things to take away from this and maybe apply to the business world. It brings outsiders into the group into the tribe and it strikes us that that might have a lot of impact in terms of onboarding and also employee engagement. Many, many employers are looking for ways to engage employees in a more meaningful way. The second thing is to think of competition, think of that competitive business presentation, How is it prepared? How do you reduce the nerves? How do you try to control an outcome that is essentially uncontrollable ritual is one of the ways that that can be done to support people and to create team cohesion. So I hope you found our brief discussion of uh ethnographic research interesting and provocative. It's just part of what we do here in the business school at Fordham. I hope you'll come visit us and learn some more.