Talking Tickets 1 January 2021! Happy New Year! TikTok! Discounts! Australia! Roll Tide! And, More!
Year 2 Episode 14
Hey!
Let me be one of the many people that email you today to wish you a Happy New Year!
Let us all hope that 2021 is a better year for the industry than 2020 was.
No Happy Hour today because I’ll be watching Alabama vs Notre Dame! Roll Tide!
Thank you for being here as we head into 2021!
If you dig what I cover, please share it with a colleague. I’m going to post a little bit on my blog later today about my marketing strategy for the coming year and there might be something there that is useful for all of you because I spent New Year’s Eve with my folks looking at the WCG segmentation, targeting, and positioning data!
Also, keep an eye on the Slack Group, if you don’t already. That’s something I’m going to focus on using a bit more effectively this year.
To the tickets!
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1. TikTok is bringing Broadway to folks for a good cause:
This afternoon there will be a performance of Ratatouille on TikTok to raise money for The Actors Fund, it will allow composers and creators to be compensated, and will just be a cool thing to open the year with.
There is a lot to like about this: it is fun, will get new audiences involved, will be a positive theatre experience for everyone to kick off the year, and will raise money.
But the bigger point here is that it is about being market oriented and looking at the world from the POV of your customers.
After a long year when Broadway, the West End, and major events have been mostly shut down around the world, people haven’t given up on the arts, but they have found that they have to go and find the arts in different ways.
As I chatted with Sean Kelly a few weeks back, we have to be willing to listen to our customers and test our guesses.
I’ll take it one step further and say that our assumptions are often dangerous because the stop us from really understanding our customers, what they want, and how we can offer them value.
This production is a one off on TikTok, but it highlights that we can still offer value to our customers, even in a pandemic by listening to them, recognizing what they value, giving them something our competition can’t, and in a way that we can do better than anyone else.
That’s what this production teaches me. Theatre and events are alive and well, we just have to do a better job of finding ways to continue to see the experience through the eyes of our customers so that we can continue to be there with them…even when we can’t be together.
2. As we starting having more customers return, remember one very important rule don’t discount:
Did I tell you that I found out some of my work on discounting has been being taught in schools around the world?
That’s one interesting thing I found out in 2020.
I was excited!
As we start getting to a point where we can have larger gatherings again, I know with almost 100% certainty that folks are not going to have spent the time thinking through their strategy and are going to run headfirst for the discount button.
Don’t!
You have a once in a lifetime opportunity to rescale pricing, rethink your strategy, and reset your relationship with your audience.
If you discount, you are going to punt the biggest opportunity you have ever seen.
Worse, you are going to set yourself back another 7 years…that’s not my opinion, that’s what the research in neuro-marketing shows.
As Lyn Gardner writes, to succeed we have to not take our customers for granted. We need to market and sell, engage, and add value.
In my experience, I’ve found that discounting is a clear indication that a business needs to rethink its strategy.
Period.
In doing some research, I found the following numbers:
24% of companies don’t have a strategy that their team can point to at all.
73% of folks with a strategy hope it will lead to growth, but 53% of businesses admit that they don’t actually know if they really know how to drive growth.
So as you look at the year ahead, think about pricing as a proxy for the health of your business.
If you are heavy on discounts or are prepping ways to push the discount button, maybe step back and ask whether or not your strategy is ready to deal with the world that you are living in now.
And, remember discounts are for dummies!
(Louis Vuitton hasn’t run a price based promotion in over 30 years…just so you know.)
3. College sports will need to think strategy first to really recover:
I wrote a lot about the challenges to the business of college sports in 2020 so I may as well start out 2021 with a quick piece on the state of college sports.
The article linked above is a quick roundup of things that one reporter is watching and I use it as a way to point out a very important idea that will sink or support your business in 2021, even if you aren’t in college sports.
Strategy comes before tactics.
It goes without saying that the way that tickets were being sold for college sports needed a refresh before the pandemic. There’s no doubt that the budgets of athletic departments were out of control. And, it is undeniable that giving the athletes more control over their image rights is going to present an opportunity for the kids that wasn’t there before.
But these are all tactical items on an agenda.
After seeing how schools are carrying hundreds of millions in debt, have bloated staffs, and had to risk student-athlete’s health in a pandemic to support a system that was broken, it is time to return to the strategy drawing board.
The three big strategy questions on everyone’s mind should be:
Who are we serving?
What are we trying to achieve?
How are we going to serve the people we need to serve?
My big point with everyone I’ve been talking with over the last year, but really from the time I got involved with my first nightclub at 21, 26 years ago is put the customer first.
If you keep the customer at the center of what you are attempting to do, you’ll win more sales, you’ll launch better selling products and services, and you’ll make more money!
All of these tactics are great, but you have to answer the big strategic questions first before you can come up with what your pricing strategy should be, where you should sell your tickets, or figure out what you should be posting on TikTok.
4. MLS and their talks with the MLSPA is about their place in the sports business market:
This is a bit of a train wreck.
MLS lost a lot of money in 2020 due to not having fans in the stands. They are likely to face a scenario where they aren’t going to have fans in the stands in a meaningful way for much of 2021 as well.
Their TV deal is $90M so that’s not floating teams very effectively either.
MLS is in trouble just as I get my first piece of MLS merchandise: an Inter Miami training top!
All kidding aside, MLS is faced with an existential challenge that can’t be papered over with more expansion, jacking up prices in the stadium, or cutting costs.
Honestly, do I know if they can make it through this?
Tough to say.
But a good place to start for MLS and any of us that are looking at how to reclaim an offensive footing heading into 2021 is to look at the 3 Cs of positioning. If you aren’t familiar with the 3 Cs, they are:
Customer
Competition
Company
If you follow them in that order, they are almost fool proof in helping your come up with some differentiation and a competitive positioning for your business.
In the case of MLS, the customer in the States has seen soccer awareness and fandom grow tremendously over the last decade. From my research, there are two worthwhile sets of fans to look at:
Soccer fans that have followed the sport for years and have a team in another league that are looking to support a team in their local area.
New fans that have been exposed to the sport recently and don’t have long-term loyalty to anyone. (Strangely, this is where I sit. My love of Spurs is really recent.)
Knowing that these are your two groups, what does the customer want?
The first group wants entertaining matches with local flavor and players that they can watch grow or that they’ve come to know.
On the second group, the entertainment factor is important and the addition of some sort of context for their fandom.
The stars that MLS bring in regularly matter, but not nearly as much as folks seem to think from the research I’ve done.
The second C is competition and where does that put MLS?
This is the toughest one for most businesses to answer because most of the time people aren’t really looking at their competition from the right angle.
It is really important that you define your competitor set with alternatives and substitutes.
This will allow MLS to effectively understand what the competition is doing and how they can position themselves as an alternative.
Again, this is tough to do without effectively defining your competition.
The final C is company.
This is pretty simple. What can MLS do better or different than their competition right now?
They are the only domestic soccer league for Americans and Canadians. This is what they are positioning especially without fans in the stands.
This may seem like a no-brainer, but there is a power in positioning yourself as the solution soccer in your city. And, in this environment, that connection needs to be drawn out and used to drive revenues through other revenue streams to try and make up for the lack of fans in the stands.
The bargaining between the union and the league is going to be a challenge. But the bigger issue is that the coronavirus is creating an environment where leagues are unstable or finding their revenue streams interrupted.
Which means, it is time to go back to the basics.
I’m putting this one in this week because it rings an optimistic bell that despite the challenges of 2020, sports business will recover.
I’d offer that up about the entire business of live entertainment.
The Australian market has shown us how to restructure sports entities, how to reopen theatre, and how to put on events with fans during a pandemic.
Plus, they are great people and they throw a great party!
So let’s celebrate with them and look at their example as we move forward.
Things may take a while to come back and things may be different on the flip side, but for thousands of years folks have gotten together in big crowds to sing, chat, and boo.
The challenge for all of us right now is to spend the time and energy necessary to do the hard work of thinking and acting strategically. To answer two important questions:
“Where will we play?”
“How will we win?”
We will have to compete for our customers’ attention coming out of this. We already saw that with the decline of ratings and TV viewing in lots of places during 2020.
But that’s okay.
New Year’s Day is a time of optimism and hope and thinking about the big picture.
Where will your business play this year?
How will you win the business of the people you aim to serve?
Thanks for being here and “Roll Tide!”
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I’m in DC! Never left after I got home from INTIX.
Listen to some podcasts!
Get to the blog and website!
Check out my friends:
Booking Protect: Simon is doing a presentation at INTIX on the state of refund protection, insurance, and coverage of live events. He’s been previewing it with me and there are some really crazy stats in the presentation about the impact of the pandemic and the ways that people can protect themselves and their customers heading out of the pandemic.
Activity Stream: The Activity Stream team have been hard at work on some new features to help folks use their customer data more effectively heading out of the pandemic. They’ve also been powering the We Will Recover initiative with ideas from folks around the world, focused on recovery! So give them a look.