As goodwill towards professional rugby has declined in New Zealand, so has the amount of money that the code and its various brands can generate, despite increasingly desperate attempts to "milk the cow".
While we may see another player as influential on the field as Jonah Lomu™, we will never again see one with his brand-backed earning power.
You would truly have to have a heart of stone not to laugh at the mess, and I frequently do so while using the management of professional rugby as a lecture example in order to demonstrate brand-bungling in its purest form.
The little green men will form part of next year's teaching material.
Such extraordinary behaviour does raise the question: why is professional rugby so consistently mismanaged? This very consistency in the face of increasingly obvious commercial damage indicates a cause that is systemic, rather than individual.
In order to identify this systemic cause, it is necessary to take a quick look at how brands work, and how they make money.
A brand is a system of positive associations in an individual's head that causes them to pay more for a product or service than it is actually worth. Such behaviour is obviously profitable to the owner of a brand, which explains why so much work goes into creating, maintaining and legally defending them.
Once these brand behaviours are established, a brand owner can extract money from them in two ways. The first source of money is known as "brand income" and is represented by the extra cash (above and beyond the value of the base product or service) that the brand generates.
The second source of money is known as "brand equity". A well-maintained brand has an indefinite lifespan and a matching indefinite capacity to generate brand income.
This means a brand has a capital value (equity) that is calculated by its capacity to earn additional income into the indefinite future.
For most purposes the "equity" of an established brand can be assumed to be about 10 multiples of its annual income. It is this that makes brands such as Coca-ColaTM worth billions.
Gordon Gecko said in the film Wall Street, "Greed is good." Greed is most definitely good in maintaining balance within corporate brand management.
The managers' impulse to "rape" any brand for short-term income (and associated pay and bonuses) is balanced by the knowledge such behaviour will rapidly reduce the brand's capacity to earn brand income, and this will in turn have a massive negative effect on equity.
Such an outcome will arouse the ire of the board as the shareholders' representative, and may well lead to the ejection of the managers responsible, and at the very least a substantial reduction in the value of their stock options.
Thus, it is the love of their wallets, and not the love of their brands themselves, that causes corporate managers not to "over-milk" their charges. It is this balance of greed that lies behind the success of both our companies and the capitalist economy that sustains our demand for branded goods.
It is the lack of this restraining factor of equity ownership that also explains the mismanagement of the brands that underpin the finances of professional rugby.
Does the All Blacks™ brand have equity? Of course it does. But unlike Coca-Cola™, it does not have any identified and empowered equity owners.
The equity of the All Blacks™ brand was built over the course of the 20th century, within the amateur code. In 1995 this brand, among others, was handed over to a small group of "professionals" within an organisational structure that was still largely a relic of the amateur era, and that did nothing to protect the money-generating assets that now fell under the control of these "pseudo-Corinthians".
The result of this handover has been miserably predictable. A 15-year feeding frenzy has seen a small group of players and managers, with no long-term stake in the brands, rip a century's worth of goodwill out of them and transform this goodwill into a short-term cash bonanza.
Initially, the money came out of the brands in torrents, then a steady flow, and now the money flow from these dying brands has declined to the point that ratepayers and taxpayers are beginning to pump the money down the hungry throats.
The "professional" boards of the unions and the IRB have stood by. Indeed, they appear to have participated in the frenzy.
They have done so because the "amateur" ownership of the unions has permitted them to.
In "big biz", control of a board, a management and ultimately a brand is ultimately exercised by a few controlling shareholders who can rapidly put together a majority of shares to rein in or evict a management that has gone feral.
The thousands of hapless individual members of the NZRU who are theoretically the equity owners of the All Blacks™ brand are simply not in a position to do this, and so the plunder continues.
What happens next? Well, as the ratepayers of this city well know, the management of professional rugby has proved venomously effective at latching on to a new host when its previous victim has been bled white.
This new food source may delay the inevitable for a while, but even this grip on public finances relies on a fading brand-based goodwill that eventually will not be able to sway local or national political calculations in professional rugby's favour.
John Key has invested a good deal of our money and his own political capital in the Rugby World Cup™ brand. Now the All Blacks™ must deliver. They are, quite literally, all playing for their professional lives.
At the local level, mayors Chin and Cull have done likewise. The local stakes are also similar.
However, management behaviour and the trajectory of brand disintegration appears to be set, and eventually the inevitable must happen.
Either professional rugby will "flame out", and revert to amateur status as the money wells run dry and its "professional" rulers depart for greener pastures, or an empowered owner must be found to protect the equity of these brands, and turn "professional" rugby into commercial rugby.
I am not aware of any amateur structure that could safely house a commercial brand with even the residual equity value of the All Blacks™. Therefore the latter outcome seems more likely.
One way this could be achieved is to issue tradeable shares in the NZRU to all of its paid-up members. Given their recent treatment, it seems likely many grass-roots rugby club members would vote with their wallets and sell out.
There will be willing buyers for these shares. Even though they have been strategically mismanaged, the fundamentals of the All Blacks™ and similar rugby brands are sound, and can recover rapidly if managed sympathetically.
I suspect that quite quickly a controlling stake would be built up and someone like Rupert Murdoch would walk into the boardroom of the NZRU as the controlling equity holder.
Then, at last, the systematic violation of these assets and the mistreatment of their supporters would stop. I am no great fan of either Rupert Murdoch or of privatisation as an ideology, but it does seem they are the best option available to the rugby community at the present time.
- Dr Robert Hamlin is a senior lecturer in marketing at the University of Otago.
