Corey Graves revealed in his recent After the Bell podcast that the NXT brand needed a change and while some fans might not be on board with the new direction, he notes it was pretty obvious as to why they needed to switch things up.
Saying he doesn't believe NXT needs more "gimmicks", he did note that the brand needed more characters. NXT needed to present its stars in a way that would connect with fans beyond just what was being offered in the ring. While he wouldn't reveal who he was talking to, he said he had a conversation this past Monday with a higher-up in the company and was asked about a performer on the show and said, ‘What is this person missing?’ He responded, 'I watched for a minute, and I said, ‘I don’t know how to sell them.’
Both agreed that the problem in NXT was that they weren't doing a very effective job of selling characters and storylines. He said WWE is in the sports entertainment business and the idea is to be a character salesman when promoting the overall product and if the talent doesn't have a unique selling feature, there's not much NXT or WWE can do for them. "If you’re selling refrigerators, it’s a refrigerator. We have lots of refrigerators. I don’t know one refrigerator from another. But if you can walk into somebody’s house and say, ‘Hey, if you buy this refrigerator, it also does this. It does that.’ It doesn’t matter what you’re selling, you have to have features to be able to sell to a consumer."
NXT 2.0 Has Already Made Improvements
Graves noted, "When you see a superstar on the screen, no matter how amazingly athletic they can be, or how cool they may look, if you can’t add any depth to that person, then they are just another superstar." He said there were a ton of really good in-ring performers in NXT, but it was tough to distinguish what separated ‘X’ superstar different from ‘Y’ superstar. That was the biggest problem in NXT and that needed changing. It's probably why the company is leaning more towards pushing stars that are undiscovered but WWE believes has that "it" quality.
He added that he already thinks NXT 2.0 has done a great job of creating interest in some of the new characters and just by looking at them or through a 30-second vignette, you have an idea of who they are.
h/t to WrestlingNews.co for the transcription
