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No More Deaths by Duck Boats

7/27/2018

4 Comments

 
Allison Warmuth and duck boat

by David Hagenbuch, founder of Mindful Marketing & author of Honorable Influence

It was a sunny spring day, and 28-year-old Allison Warmuth was doing one of the things she enjoyed most—riding her red scooter through the streets of Boston.  Tragically, that ride on April 30, 2016 was her last.  A duck boat operator failed to see her stopped at a traffic signal and plowed into her scooter from behind.
 
Why remember an accident more than two years past that took a single life, when 17 people riding a duck boat on Table Rock Lake near Branson, Missouri drowned just a week ago?  The reason is personal:  I knew Allison Warmuth.
 
Several years before, Allie had been a student in one of my marketing classes. I quickly learned that she was a bright and hard-working student, as well as a kind and compassionate person.  She wore a warm smile and exuded charm that endeared her to others.
 
I was Allie’s teacher for only a few months, but the latest Duck Boat accident has evoked thoughts of her untimely passing, returning sadness to me and others who knew her.  It’s hard to image the pain that those closest to such accident victims feel, having suddenly lost their brother or sister, husband or wife, daughter or son . . .
 
Mindful Marketing didn’t exist when Allie was a student.  Today other marketing faculty and I use the Mindful Matrix with our classes to assess the marketing actions of organizations like Ride the Ducks.   I wonder what a sharp student like Allie would have said about duck boats, not knowing that one would one day take her life, or that similar vessels would be responsible for the deaths of dozens of others. 
 
Over the past 19 years, 43 people have died in duck boat-related accidents.  Foreshadowing the Branson tragedy, thirteen people passed away in 1999 when a duck boat sank on a lake near Hot Springs, Arkansas.  In 2010 in Philadelphia, two tourists died when a tugboat pushed a barge into their stranded duck boat.
 
The amphibious vehicles also have been responsible for several fatalities on land.  In addition to Allie’s death, a woman fell backward from a duck boat in a parking lot in Boston in 2003, while taking a picture.  Also, in 2015, “five college students were killed and more than 70 people injured when a duck boat veered into a charter bus on a bridge above Seattle's Lake Union.”
 
It’s important to realize that one company does not own and operate all of the nation’s duck boats; rather, several different firms run tours in select cities around the country.  For instance, Original Wisconsin Ducks®, located in Wisconsin Dells, WI, bills itself as “the ONLY duck tour in the world in continuous operation since 1946.”  Meanwhile, “Ride the Ducks” offers duck boat tours in Branson, MO; Seattle, WA; Stone Mountain Park, GA, and Guam.  “Boston Duck Tours” is yet another private company, providing tours just in its namesake city and claiming to be “Boston’s most popular tour.”

Our course, what all of these companies have in common is their use of the distinctive duck boat, a World War II-era vehicle used to transport troops and supplies from ship to shoreline during beach invasions.  Duck boats reportedly were responsible for delivering over 40% of over-beach supplies during the first four months of the invasion of Normandy.
 
During combat, a complex system of switches and levers kept the boats afloat by cranking the propellers, managing tire inflation, and pumping water out of the hulls.  Some of the duck boats used today, including the one that sank in Missouri, date back to WW II.  Most of those boats have been retrofitted in certain ways, including cabin extensions to accommodate more passengers.
 
The obvious benefit of a duck boat is that it can operate both on land and in water.  Like a printer that also makes copies, dual-purpose can be a plus.  The problem with some multi-functional devices, however, is that they do neither of their main tasks especially well, i.e., they’re ‘jacks of all trades, masters of none.’
 
Attorney Andrew Duffy, who has handled cases involving duck boat fatalities in Philadelphia, supports that description and then some.  He calls the vehicles “death traps” that are “not fit for water or land because they are half car and half boat.”
 
On land, the main issue is visibility.  Duck boats were designed to travel up empty beaches, not to navigate crowded city streets, which pose challenges for their considerable length and girth.  More importantly, the vessels’ high elevation and long bows create a wide, five-foot-high blind-spot that makes it easy for operators to overlook smaller vehicles and pedestrians.  Such design contributed to Allie’s death on that fateful day in April.
 
In water, duck boats’ relative lack of buoyancy causes them to sit lower in the water than many other boats, which becomes an even greater issue in bad weather like that on the day of the Branson disaster.  Perhaps the biggest dangers, though, are the fixed canopies and roll-down window covers. Duffy explains: “When you are cruising along in a normal boat, if it capsizes you go [out of the boat and] into the water.  With duck boats, you have the opposite effect. The canopy literally acts to drag you down with it.”
 
Duffy adds that the “heavy cellophane” many duck boat companies use for windows makes escape from a sinking craft even more difficult.  Furthermore, passengers who don life jackets are at greater risk of being trapped underwater, as the vests push them upward and into the submerged canopy.
 
But, 43 deaths in about 20 years is miniscule compared to 40,100 U.S. motor vehicle fatalities in 2017.  So, should we really be concerned about duck boats?
 
One thing to consider is that the total number of motor vehicle excursions in the U.S. in a year is undoubtedly many times the number of duck boat tours over the past two decades, so it should be expected that there will be many more ‘non-amphibious’ motor vehicle accidents than amphibious ones.  Furthermore, when we climb into cars and onto buses, we assume the risks because we usually don’t have other options:  We need to get to work or school, and motor vehicle transportation is the only reasonable way to do so.
 
On the other hand, no one needs to take a duck boat tour.  It’s a low-intensity leisure activity that’s easy to substitute, so the risk to those on or near the vehicles should be virtually zero.  Yes, some recreational pursuits like bull riding and mountain climbing place people at considerable risk of death or injury, but well-trained and adventurous adults knowingly accept those risks.  Families with young children, senior citizens, and others simply looking to see the sights of a city shouldn’t have to worry about dying on a tour.
 
However, some duck boat companies, like Original Wisconsin Ducks, which operates the nation’s largest fleet of ducks (92), claim to have never had an accident.  Should they be allowed to operate as-is?
 
That’s a decision that objective experts need to make; however, it’s worth noting that Ride the Ducks in Branson also apparently never had an accident before 17 people died, even though company spokesperson Suzanne Smagala-Potts has said that “The safety of our guests and employees is our number one priority” and despite a private safety inspector having warned the firm about life-threatening design flaws in its vessels less than a year before the fatal accident.
 
It’s also worth noting that James Hall, former chair of the National Transportation Safety Board, has suggested that duck boats are inherently dangerous and should be banned from commercial recreational use.  Hall doesn’t believe there’s a way to make the vehicles safe, especially during bad weather.
 
What would Allie Warmuth say about duck boats?  As a sharp businessperson, she would likely appreciate the tours’ strong consumer demand.  However, as a rational and caring human being, she also would recognize that revenue potential doesn’t outweigh the risk to life.  As a result, duck boat tours should be considered “Single-Minded Marketing.”
 
Note: Allie’s family has created a Facebook page to help prevent similar accidents and to ensure the safety of others.  Please consider visiting and liking Street Safety for Allie.


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Churches for Men Who Don’t Like Church

7/7/2018

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by Michael Zigarelli, professor of leadership and strategy at Messiah College
mzigarelli@messiah.edu


“Jake” is not his real name, but he’s a real guy experiencing real change. Jake is 37 with three kids, married for 13 years, many of them unhappy. His life and his work are  uninspiring, but it’s a living.

Gradually, his living is becoming a life, and it’s happening in the last place he’d expect: a church.

Jake’s making friends there, his first since becoming a parent. The chronic loneliness of his life—he didn’t even know how bad it was—is subsiding. There’s more peace in his household, too, probably because there’s more peace in Jake. The kids notice that dad’s different; Jake and his wife have turned back the clock 10 years. The aquifer of anger just beneath the surface has dried up.

Gone as well is Jake’s misperception of God. He’s learning that God really does love him. That’s changed everything, giving Jake a new identity—his real identity.

Now multiply Jake’s experience by a hundred thousand. Maybe more. Research I’m conducting across the United States reveals that there are countless Jakes out there because a few innovative churches have figured out how to reach them.

Why Some Churches Target Men

The concept of a “target market” is Business 101, just as the analogous concept of a “target people group” is Missions 101. It’s axiomatic. It works. From a theological perspective, it’s good stewardship.

So consider the logic of “adult men,” or some subset, being a church’s primary target. First, a scant one in five men attends religious services weekly in the United States. Second, there’s the longstanding gender gap: Sit in the back pew this Sunday and you can count 50 percent more women than men. And third, targeting men seems to accelerate church growth. Consider these strikingly-consistent perspectives from senior pastors I interviewed:
  • “It’s a very simple argument: You reach the man, you reach the family.”
  • “If the men are respected and feel comfortable in your church, the families will follow.”
  • “We stumbled into this strategy: If you get the man, you often get everyone in his circle.”
  • “We asked ‘how do we reach the most people?’ and it seemed that if we could reach the husband or the dad, then we had a good shot at reaching the rest.”

The churches in my study do not appear to be part of some masculinity movement. Rather, they’ve simply adopted an efficient and catalytic strategy: Get the man, get the family. The approach not only reaches a vast and underserved “people group,” it has the byproduct effect of bringing in women and children by the vanload.

Perhaps that’s why most of these churches have gone from start-up to thousands in weekly attendance in a mere decade or two. One, in fact, now attracts 10,000 visitors a week system-wide. Another attracts 27,000.

As a strategy professor, I can’t say I’m surprised by the growth. These churches are pursuing what’s known in my world as a “blue ocean strategy,” the disproportionately powerful decision to go where the “non-customers” are—that is, to serve an ignored segment of the market that would buy your product under the right conditions. The pastors have simply provided the right conditions, enabling their churches to claim, again, to use the business language, “uncontested market space” (i.e., the men who would not be in any church otherwise).

Hence the metaphor of operating in an undisturbed “blue ocean.” No competition there, only demand. It’s the same approach that propelled Henry Ford, Milton Hershey, Sam Walton, and Steve Jobs. Many others as well: Southwest Air, CNN, Home Depot, Airbnb, Cirque du Soleil, Starbucks, Nintendo, Netflix, Quicken—all have soared by serving those formerly on the sidelines.

My emerging sense is that there is plenty of room in that blue ocean for churches beyond those in this study. In other words, there seems to be a wide-open space for more effective evangelism and discipleship of men, and by extension, those in their sphere of influence. Let me introduce you to a few exemplars.

Seven Man-Friendly Churches

For this project, I found seven churches overflowing with men. They’re not that way by chance. Rather, they’ve been intentional, even relentless, about pursuing men as their primary “target people group.” In alphabetical order, the churches in this study are:
  • 121 Community Church, Grapevine TX, Founding Pastor Ross Sawyers
  • Christ’s Church of the Valley (CCV), Peoria AZ, Founding Pastor Don Wilson
  • Coastal Church, Daphne AL, Founding Pastor Chad Stafford
  • Mecklenburg Community Church, Charlotte NC, Founding Pastor Jim White
  • Northwood Church, Summerville SC, Founding Pastor Fred Richard
  • Revolution Church, Tucson AZ, Founding Pastor Josh Reich
  • Wheatland Salem United Methodist Church, Naperville IL, Pastor Jennifer Wilson

Each is man-friendly at its core, designed to reach the unreached. Their goals and strategies make that plain. So do these quotes from some of the senior pastors I interviewed:

“I have the Biblically-illiterate, f-bomb-dropping guy in my head with every talk I write.”

“The person we’re trying to connect with is the 20- to 40-year-old guy who comes in, probably late, sits in the back row, folds his arms and says ‘God, this is your last shot.’”

“Our target is the young dad who was in a fraternity, went to church and hated it, is now working 60 hours a week. He’s more in need of community than he’s ever been in his life; he’s so disconnected from God.”

One pastor summed it up straightforwardly for them all: “I go after guys who were raised Christian, but who haven’t been to church in a while.” Simple. Focused. The classic hedgehog technique from Good to Great.

How do they do it? Their implementation weaves its way through the music, the messages, the staffing choices, the platforming and promotions, even the colors and decor. They’ve replaced flowers and pastels with earth tones and lobby screens tuned to ESPN. They avoid love songs to Jesus and other language that makes guys feel weird. They keep the service to an hour, the messages to a half-hour, and the content intensely practical.

And they do so much more. You can find the details in this Christianity Today article or these more in-depth pieces on LinkedIn and on YouTube.

Women and Children Love These Churches, Too

While it’s possible to become a man-friendly church at the expense of others, the leaders I interviewed seem better than that, seeking win-wins. Most, for example, have gone big with children’s ministry—huge, in fact—not just to serve the kids, but because guys who won’t come to church for themselves will attend if their kids love it.

Women are also enthusiastic about these churches, according to the leadership. Ecstatic in many cases. This quote from one of the pastors echoes what I heard from several of them: “No lady has ever said we’re too masculine. But I’ve had dozens of them come to me with tears in their eyes, saying ‘I’ve been trying to get my husband to go to church for 20 years and this is the only church he will ever go to. Thank you so much!’”

While this research is ongoing, my preliminary conclusion is that these church leaders have found an approach that is working for everyone, reaching thousands who would otherwise remain alienated from God, and offering us a novel, nonprofit example of “Mindful Marketing.”


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