End of Year Countdown: AFL & NRL! Tours! And, the West End!
Happy Boxing Day to those of you who celebrate! Come on You Spurs!
Hi!
Let’s continue the year-end countdown of stories.
I’m emailing you from the couch as the Boxing Day football matches start.
To the Tickets!
Number 9: The AFL and NRL set records.
This story stood out to me because the AFL and NRL show that you can continue growing your attendance in any environment.
Why are the AFL and NRL able to grow so aggressively the last two years?
Investing in the fan experience.
Building community.
Being consistent in their branding and marketing.
An idea that didn’t make the list but falls into the fan experience area is the Suns’ $2 menu.
This idea has a similar comparison in Atlanta at Mercedes Benz stadium, The Masters where menu prices are a story every year, and in many of my rants about the price of beer at stadiums.
This is meant to highlight touchpoints.
What I know about touchpoints is that everything matters.
The good stuff adds up slowly.
The bad stuff can tear you down in a snap.
A $2 menu item is a small, additive thing.
The community is important because this is another touchpoint.
The sense of community, connection, and camaraderie is a key to building and sustaining any fanbase.
Look at this piece about why Tottenham is so popular in America.
The key is having a sense of place, connection, and togetherness.
During the college football playoff, we saw that with Tennessee fans at Ohio State and that damn “Rocky Top.”
Ultimately, consistency of branding and marketing plays a huge role in growing your fan base.
What does consistency mean?
This depends on your team and your market.
But what doesn’t work is just showing up once or only when you want the sale.
After the first of the year, I’m going to put together some ideas around building consistency into your sales and marketing.
Number 8: West End ticket prices EXPLODE!
I find it interesting that the prices on premium tickets have jumped 50%, but prices on the lower end are falling, 3.4% on average this year.
The Week does a great job covering this. So give the article a look.
But we need to know a few things about pricing heading into the new year:
Your costs don’t matter to the customer. So you have to price according to their perception of value.
Good price setting demands research.
Three steps to setting a good price: Process/Price/Promotion
I’ll have more pricing for you later in the list.
Number 7: Tours Get Cancelled, Festivals Shutter, and Demand Appears to Be Softening.
To name a few:
GQ even wrote a feature on the topic.
Festivals, just a few:
Both of these seem to signal a slackening of demand:
Spend a few minutes going through #PaysToWait.
Or, the feed of Empty Seats Galore.
What do you need to know?
Price carefully: pricing is a signal.
Remember a term I learned early in my nightclub career: share of wallet.
Know your customers. The Discord groups, driven by #SneakerKids and the “a fool is easily parted from his money” mindset.
Don’t know what the Discord groups are?
Let me know.
I’ll explain in a future newsletter.
For now, I’ll be back later with numbers 6 down to 1.
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