What Product Marketers Can Learn from The Savannah Bananas: Lessons in Breaking Through a Crowded Market

We can all learn lessons about creating categories, building excitement, and standing apart from the man in the yellow hat.

We’ve all been there, staring down at a new product or feature on the roadmap and wondering, “How do we stand out from the rest?” We debate with our teams about the future possibilities. Do we call ourselves the next generation? Do we fit into an established category? Do we need to stretch a category definition and ride its coattails? How about creating a category?

Over the last 20 years in cybersecurity, we have seen it all. Next-gen came and went, with a touch of military-grade this, zero-trust that, all through the set it and forget one pane of glass. And as you roll your eyes, remember, we’ve all been there, and you get the point. Product marketing teams face a constant challenge to stand out in a sea of evolving technology, complicated messages, and rising competitors with similar claims and promises. Despite their innovative potential, new products and features often risk being lost in the noise.

So where should we look? Well, beyond the 1s and 0s and into the diamond. Enter the Savannah Bananas, a collegiate league baseball team that revolutionized its industry by doing the unexpected.

Under the leadership of Jesse Cole, famous for his yellow tuxedo and unconventional approach, the Bananas didn’t just disrupt baseball; they redefined it.

Challenge the Status Quo

“Whatever's normal, do the exact opposite.” - Jesse Cole

After Jesse and Emily took over the Savannah Bananas, they realized they could not just be another collegiate summer league circuit team to increase their fan base. Despite the average attendance of fans to their regular games, it was not enough to financially support the team meaningfully. After a few exhibition games with the new Banana Ball rules, they found the right game to play with faster rules, mid-game dance breaks, big music, and a fan-first focus that broke traditional norms. Banana Ball was initially saved only for home games, but as the demand and popularity increased, the show had to go on the road, expanding with new teams and host cities.

The lesson? Don’t just improve on existing categories; redefine them. The same applies to product innovation. Instead of releasing “just another” endpoint detection solution or vulnerability scanner, focus on solving the problems no one else has dared to tackle. For instance, Wiz reimagined cloud security by making risk visibility across all cloud layers its cornerstone, breaking free from the silos of traditional solutions. Going further back, the NGAV and EDR wars disrupted signature-based endpoint security and reshaped the industry.

Success starts with understanding your landscape and competition. Dive deeply into the pain points customers face daily. What frustrates them about their current solutions? Where are their workflows inefficient? List how your product addresses these gaps, and build your positioning to challenge the accepted norms. Streamline demos, highlight critical features, and clearly articulate the differences and impact of your solution, as well as why the old category isn’t keeping up. By the time you launch, you shouldn’t be asking customers about their pain points with Product X or Problem Y; you should already know them inside out. Instead, walk them through how things could be different, setting the rules your competitors will be forced to address or follow.

Don’t Just Sell a Product—Build a Movement

“Fans first” is more than a slogan (and book) for the Bananas; it is the heart of their business model. Jesse Cole’s emphasis on creating an emotional connection with fans turned attendees into evangelists. Looking at the traditional baseball game, it was clear that changes needed to happen to build the fanbase back up. Across the game, attendance was down, prices were up, and overall energy supporting “America’s Pastime” was waning. Before COVID, the numbers were dropping, and after the pandemic, they did not recover, impacting every league from Major to Collegiate.

Source: Baseball America

The Bananas saw an opportunity to reimagine the game. They turned single games into viral moments by delivering hot clips directly to fans' devices and introducing Banana Ball—featuring faster rules, entertaining plays, and influencer-ready content. Their embrace of social media and open access to content built a global fanbase, creating waitlists for local games and driving demand for national roadshows. At the same time, they improved the stadium experience with lowered, all-inclusive ticket prices and more accessible games, transforming their team into a community. Jesse and his team recognized that by making games more approachable, entertaining, and inviting, they were building something bigger than baseball: A movement.

So, how can product marketers create a movement? By tying products to a greater opportunity and a grander vision, we can inspire customers to become evangelists who trust our vision, product, and technology. The most successful products aren’t always the first to market—they’re the ones built by teams who stopped to listen to the customers of the originals.

This is no easy task. Many of us have tried, failed, and tried again. But when we align the right product with the right mission, we can solidify our company’s position while showcasing the opportunities our solution creates. Yes, it feels safer to focus on specific features or immediate outcomes, but that narrow view limits the potential for long-term growth (e.g., evolving from a series of standalone solutions to a unified platform).

CrowdStrike did this by championing a vision of stopping breaches before they happened. Okta didn’t just market identity management—they sold “Zero Trust” as the foundation of modern identity access security. Both companies didn’t just solve singular problems; they redefined categories and turned their customers into advocates for their vision.

This is where product marketing transcends its traditional product-focused role by shaping the brand and mission. It gives the GTM teams a strong foundation while positioning the organization as more than a single solution provider. Product marketing transforms the company into a trusted partner, a subject matter expert, and an industry leader through creative actions, education, and opportunities. By connecting the product to an emotional outcome, we leave customers with the confidence to trust us, our products, and our vision with their most significant challenges.

Inject Personality and Creativity into Your Brand

Jesse Cole’s iconic yellow tuxedo is more than a personal branding tool. Just like the Savannah Bananas, Jesse is not afraid to stand out among the team and the fans. Just as the players don their uniforms, he wears the yellow tuxedo as the ringleader to the weird mashup of a circus and baseball. It's all part of the foundation of other quirky touches like “banana pep talks” and a breakdancing first base coach, making baseball fun, even for those who weren’t fans of the sport.

Product marketing should not be dull or formulaic. Creativity and personality in campaigns leave lasting impressions, enabling announcements to break through the noise in crowded markets. And no, this doesn’t mean defaulting to tired tropes like hooded figures hunched over keyboards in dark basements (please, let this trend finally disappear). Such clichés are creative stagnation, and in an industry full of vendors scrambling for attention, bland or predictable approaches are easily and quickly ignored.

Every product release is an opportunity to take the stage. It’s not just about delivering features or announcements; it’s about creating moments that resonate with the targeted audience. Through your pre-launch research, you know what your competitors are saying, doing, and presenting, and that is your baseline. Internal spokespeople with respected history, unique demos that aren't just walk-throughs of features, and well-crafted customer stories can all add personality to a launch. These are the functional elements of a campaign, the core memory-making moments, and the opportunities to captivate your audience and leave a lasting impression.

Personality takes time though. Yes, you could buy a branded tux and stand out for the short term at a conference, but there is more to personality building. Just like the product roadmap, the creative campaign will take lots of pre-planning leading up to the unveiling, and if done right, can align to a product launch leading your company to have its very own “But wait, there’s more” moment.

Creativity sets your product apart, especially in a field where many companies rely on sterile, overly technical messaging.

Obsess Over the Customer Experience

The Savannah Bananas revolutionized how fans experience baseball, from streamlined ticketing to surprises during every game. Jesse Cole constantly asks, “What’s the perfect fan experience?” and works backward from there.

The same principle applies to cybersecurity product marketers. What is your idea customer’s perfect experience? Do product management and engineering know the answer? Do you have the data to back the answers up? Will solving one problem open up another problem? These are the kinds of questions we should all ask at every stage of launch planning, from the roadmap review to the technical training documentation creation.

Think beyond the product's features and focus on the customer journey from start to finish. How easy is it for prospects to understand the goal of the solution? Is the product messaging clear, concise, and tailored to their pain points? Do your product demos feel informative, or do they just feature walk-throughs? Beyond marketing materials, consider how your product itself supports existing users. Cybersecurity buyers don’t want to add yet another product to their ever-growing stack of features, consoles, and capabilities. They want comprehensive and effective solutions that make their team’s lives easier, reduce their attack surface, minimize costs, and address existing problems in a scalable way.

It is often easy for us to accept the status quo of deliverables, justifying them with statements like “This is how we’ve always done it” and moving on. We often forget about the customers, their growth and scaling needs, and training, pointing them to the latest technical documentation and calling it good. That is not the perfect customer experience, and this is the opportunity to change that.

Education, information, and early access demos will set your solution apart from others in the field. Don the white glove and, walk existing customers through what is to come, and produce training material to support their growth into the new capability. Are there workflow changes that might need a more hands-on approach or dynamic in-product messaging? As a product marketer, it’s essential to ask the development team these questions to advocate for the customers who have already invested in your future. Remember, customers don’t churn because of great customer experiences.

The Savannah Bananas Playbook for Cybersecurity Marketing

The Savannah Bananas treat every game like an event, building hype and anticipation through viral videos, engaging fan interactions, and a sense of community. “We’re in the entertainment business, not the baseball business,” Cole often says. And the team’s growing success is not the product of blending in, but of standing out in one of the most tradition-bound industries imaginable.

We all dream of our category-defining moment, the opportunity to bring something truly great and revolutionary to market, but the reality is not every release will change the whole world. But there is an opportunity to change the small world around us and, with consistency and creativity, impact our customers, prospects, GTM teams, and more. We can continue to leave small marks of change here and there, challenging the status quo, until a much larger picture emerges for the world to see.

Rome was not built overnight, and your brand’s reputation won’t be either. But we can certainly start laying the foundations for the next empire. As we are all tasked with introducing new features, solutions, products, and more in a crowded market, the Bananas offer a clear lesson: toss out the rule book and dare to be different.