Talking Tickets 1 October 2021: A Pricing Class! Falling Prices on the Secondary! The Mets Brand! And, More!
Number 104! Two years old!
Good morning!
Today is the two-year birthday of the newsletter!
I’ll be going to tonight’s Red Sox v. Nationals game in DC to celebrate! Or, just to go…you decide.
Give the newsletter a birthday present and share it.
BTW, I’m considering doing a BETA version of a new online cohort class called “Set the Right F&^$% Price” and I’m going to limit it to a group of 12-20 folks. I’m piecing the whole thing together right now, but if you are interested in potentially taking part, send me a note and let me know your interest.
To the Tickets!
1. Roger Federer, the Laver Cup, and Brand Management 101:
Big Ideas:
Your brand is the accumulation of every interaction a customer has with you, good or bad.
Make sure your brand codes reflect what you want them to reflect.
The Wakeman Brand Triangle says that a brand is built on three ideas: Awareness, Meaning, and Impression
Early warning, this week we talk a lot about branding because there are two really juicy branding stories to cover this week. In general, the power of your brand carries great importance, so I wanted to give the concept a bit more attention.
That out of the way, Roger Federer’s brand management team is doing a bang-up job and one that all of us can learn from.
First, he’s doing a great job of building up really powerful associations for his brand as a pitchman and athlete. In my research, a few of the better associations were “elite”, “premium”, and “accessible”.
That’s amazing that you can be “elite” and “premium” while still having people feel like you are relatable.
That’s sort of like Apple.
Second, Roger Federer seems to understand the idea that your brand is everything, the accumulation of all the touchpoints with your market, good or bad, over time.
Looking at Roger Federer’s focus with the Laver Cup: telling the story of the previous generation of tennis players, connecting them to today’s stars through him, and expanding into the future by highlighting rising stars is one example of how Federer realizes that nothing about the way you present yourself is meaningless.
One of the first things you learn in strategy is that strategy is about choice, but you want the choice to be intentional and not done willy nilly.
More importantly, strategy is about picking the things you won’t do.
This makes the example of Morgan Wallen selling out in the south an interesting contrast because if Wallen has done this intentionally, good for him. But if it just happened because he mismanaged his brand and his career, oops!
Finally, a new concept I’ve created is called “The Wakeman Brand Triangle” and it highlights the reality that any brand is built on three key ideas:
The awareness your market has of your product or service.
The impression your brand leaves on your market.
The meaning that your market injects into your brand because of their interactions with you.
Heading into 2021, I did some research that said I needed to make sure to raise my awareness, that awareness was the number one challenge I was going to deal with in 2021.
Thus, you’ve seen me out there doing lots of media and other things to raise my brand awareness.
Lord help me, it sounds so pretentious when I say it like that.
On impression, Roger Federer’s examples of “elite”, “premium”, and “accessible” are great and reflect back in the way that he conducts interviews but also the products he associates himself with.
As for me, I’ve often wanted folks to think of me as thoughtful, intelligent, and creative.
Final point, meaning.
In both the case of me and Roger Federer, we can’t define the meaning that you might feel for our brand.
This is true for everyone, no matter what they are doing.
The customer’s perception is most important.
Ours doesn’t matter at all.
How does this work for y’all?
First, think about what you want your brand to mean to your market. In my opinion, one of the biggest branding wins of the last decade or so is Tesla because they’ve really managed to build the meaning of their brand to be “great cars, that happen to be electric”.
Think through this stuff and focus on the impression you want to leave behind just like I talk about with Corey Gibbs in this conversation on the podcast this week.
Everything starts with you understanding the market and your fit in the market, diagnosis.
Finally, play with “The Wakeman Brand Triangle” and look at the three primary factors of brand building: awareness, meaning, and impression. Figure out where you are with each of them and address them where necessary.
Again, I’ve been playing with branding a lot lately because it really matters and carries even more importance now.
2. Is the CMA “frustrated” with its ability to protect customers?
Big Ideas:
Customer protection is a big concern in markets around the world.
There is a growing need for a holistic view of the ticket market everywhere.
The debate around an unregulated versus a regulated secondary market is interesting.
I’m a big fan of STAR and Jonathan Brown.
If you’ve never had a chance to meet Jonathan, he is a great guy and the folks that work on STAR in the UK are all really great people. I’ve been friends with them for years and I admire their work around customer protection. In my opinion, it has helped push the industry forward in the UK and other markets because they’ve highlighted good and bad practices that have spread.
This piece focuses more on the CMA and the ticket market at large, but in my mind, it brings up three important things to explore today:
Customer protection is a big issue in many markets and the resources needed to give this protection teeth are often missing.
Holistically thinking about the ticket market is important.
There is an interesting debate in the UK and other parts of the world about the regulated versus the unregulated secondary market.
Let’s dig into each of these quickly.
First, customer protection.
The Competitive Markets Authority is somewhat similar to the FTC in the United States. They aren’t apple to apple comparisons, but they share a similar duty to help ensure markets are competitive.
Traditional antitrust enforcement, which we have talked about in the past, highlights consumer protection as one of the key goals.
The report on the CMA highlights the importance of consumer protection in their mission and the article highlights the ongoing struggles to enforce penalties against bad actors, especially pre-emptively.
This harms the ticket industry because it allows a few bad actors to denigrate the entire ticket community, on the primary and secondary sides.
Second, the need to think through things holistically.
I’ve mentioned here that I’ve gone back to school during the pandemic to study up on branding, marketing, entrepreneurship, and strategy.
It is strategy that is most relevant here because you have to start with the root cause or the root goal to achieve ultimate, consistent success.
If you look at a lot of businesses around the world, tactics have won out people’s attention because they are easy and make people feel like they are doing something.
Unfortunately, always acting tactically leads to bad outcomes like deep discounts, unsold tickets, lessening of fan interest, and more.
The entire industry is calling out for a holistic approach to selling and marketing live events and in my analysis of the situation, in too many cases, folks didn’t spend much or any of their downtime during the pandemic thinking strategically.
This keeps people focusing on this moment’s pain and not on the actions that will lead to long-term success and sustainability.
Finally, the conversation about the regulated secondary market versus the unregulated secondary market is interesting.
Why?
Because I’ve seen the value of the secondary market in the United States to help push innovation, better customer understanding, and new technologies.
On the flip side, I’ve also seen the downside of the secondary market with too much emphasis on tactics, bad pricing habits, commoditization of the experience, and brand destruction due to certain actions that turn off customers like the use of BOTS to flood an on-sale.
Like the holistic market focus above, I don’t think there is a one-size-fits-all approach to what the secondary market looks like.
In most instances, I look at the actions that happen on the secondary market and look for the incentives.
There are excess profits to be made on tickets. I’m biased to the argument a band like the Foo Fighters or Pearl Jam will make about selling their tickets at the price they set. They have the power to control their market and impose restrictions on the transfer and resale of their tickets. Good for them. They’ve built audiences, brands, and power that allows them to do such things.
On the other hand, I’ve seen plenty of shows and artists that need the secondary market to help move inventory. In these cases, I’ve seen deals cut, restrictions removed, and other actions.
Again, incentives cut both ways.
In my view, the argument around regulated and unregulated comes back to the holistic view of the market.
What are your goals?
What is your strategy? Including distribution and pricing?
In other words, I’m not absolutely in one camp or the other, but somewhere in the middle where nuance reigns.
It is lonely here some days. But we make great drinks and the chairs are comfy!
3. Mets are working on updating their brand:
Big Ideas:
Demographics is a bad way to segment a market.
Strategy before tactics.
Begin everything with diagnosis.
I’m including a lot of brand stuff this week for a few reasons:
The brand is everything in marketing. It is more than the BS that gets shared by numpties on the internet.
Your brand can drive revenue and profits for your business, among other positive impacts.
I love brands and branding.
I have a strong affection for the Mets. I can’t tell you how many Mets games I’ve been to over the years. And, I can just go on about how much the Mets meant to me when I first moved to New York. I’d often ride the 7 out to Flushing with the Sunday papers, sit in the bleachers in centerfield, drink beer, and hang out.
What a time!
In reviewing my Brand Triangle, when we talk about meaning, the biggest thing that always sticks with me is that the Mets are the team of the City. The Yankees are NY, but they always felt like Jersey’s team to me.
That’s simplistic, but it always felt like there was so much more heat in the City when the Mets were good than when the Yankees were great.
Now we see a bunch of articles about the Mets’ focusing on updating their brand to attract a younger audience.
There are a few things to think about here:
First, demographics is a bad way to segment a market.
The foundation of any good brand management project is diagnosis. The foundation of diagnosis is research: qualitative and quantitative.
From there, you draw a picture of your market: segmentation.
There are a lot of ways to segment your market, but only one that really holds up to any analysis: behavioral segmentation.
In the case of what is being proposed by the Mets, the segmentation seems to be being driven by demographics which lets me point out the weakness here by highlighting a few theoretical situations:
How different a 12-year-old boy and girl are.
How different a 15-year-old girl in a rural area is from a city girl.
How different a rich kid is versus a poor kid.
I can go on, but I hope you get the point.
Segment based on behavior and not on demographics.
Start with ethnography, go to small groups, and move to bigger groups.
That’s the basics of research.
Second, a 14% decline in TV viewership is a part of a trend of lower live sports viewership.
This has been going on for some time, but it isn’t really a reflection of the death of TV. While true that TV is declining, the numbers are slow and steady…not off a cliff. The last data I saw was around a 2-3% decline a year.
What is also true is that 80% or so of people downloaded, participated, or took part in some sort of video game content during the pandemic and a lot of that was driven by the desire to be a part of a community.
This means that there are some headwinds, but they aren’t insurmountable.
Finally, I’m concerned that this might end up being too tactical in nature and not strategic enough.
In Vegas, I heard my catchphrase: “strategy before tactics” a lot.
Thank you! Thank you!
Looking at this situation with my brand hat on, I should teach y’all about Brand Management 101.
When you start managing a brand, any brand, there is a three-step process to follow:
Diagnose the problem.
Build a strategy.
Deliver the strategy using your tactics.
Rinse and repeat.
Two things are true from the brand projects I’ve worked on over the years:
Most brands and brand managers are living in a constant state of chaos because marketing has been devalued in their organization and across the board in too many places.
This is happening because too many brands and brand managers are overwhelmingly spending their time on the commodification of their brands through an overemphasis on tactics.
The plan I’ve laid out for brand management is the tried and true way that brands are managed going back to the birth of brand management in Cincinnati, Ohio on May 13th, 1931 with the McElroy Memo.
I could go on about this stuff all day long, but I’ll tighten this one up so I can return to it again in the months ahead.
First, any competent brand manager knows that the first step in a proper branding effort is diagnosis.
Step back, look at the market for what it is and not what you want it to be.
That’s why it is dangerous to promote actions to be taken, ideas that are being explored, or possible ways to execute the plan. These things create a bias. And, the bias is towards not doing the work properly because you’ll jump right into tactics and the continued commodification of your brand.
Diagnose first.
Second, segment based on behavior.
I shared the meaningful/actionable grid exercise with a couple of people I know and they admitted that after seeing the items that go into a proper segmentation, they’ll never go back to segmentation by demographics or other easy to create but often useless forms of segmentation.
Why?
Because behavior is what matters.
If you are a venue, a team, a band, or any organization, you need folks to take specific actions.
I’ve used the Prince Charles and Ozzy Osbourne example before, but let me use another ridiculous one here that better illustrates my point.
Think about this, by most generational, age-based demographic segmentation: Pete Davidson and Prince George are the same generations because their age is only separated by 18 years.
That’s ridiculous.
Focus on actions. What people do, not what they say, or how old they are.
Finally, strategy before tactics.
Again, a tired refrain, but I know that people often need to hear a message more times than a marketer has patience for delivering it before it seeps in.
In any proper brand work, you diagnose the challenge.
What worked and what didn’t?
What is the issue now?
What does the market look like?
Then you build a strategy around this.
Take action after that.
Review your results.
Adjust.
Begin again!
It isn’t quite that simple, but it also isn’t nearly as complicated as folks like to make it. Follow the process. Do the work.
As for the Mets, I hope the rebranding efforts are successful. Y’all know that they are my favorite baseball team.
4. Ticket prices are falling on the secondary market:
Big Ideas:
Demand is dropping and prices are falling with demand.
In the before times, a majority of tickets on the secondary market sold for under face value. Now, that number is bigger.
The V-shaped recovery and “demand like no one has ever seen” were all BS, to begin with, but even more so now…just look at the data.
This piece has a bit of everything to close out this week:
The sugar high of a huge jump in demand when nothing has been on sale and then a ton goes on sale.
A case for civil society.
Demand that is dropping.
Too much inventory.
The reality that so many tickets on the secondary market go below face value.
We began the week with me and we will end the week with me. The Wakeman Brand Triangle is on full display here.
Eric Fuller gets to a lot of stuff in this week’s article on the secondary market, demand falling, and prices that are getting into Venti latte territory in some cases.
Let’s run through a few things quickly:
First, we are seeing the sugar high of demand playing out, as predicted. This isn’t some sort of pessimistic statement, but a view of the reality of the situation when tons of tickets went on sale and people busted out of their houses after things were locked down for over a year.
This was predictable because again:
Too much inventory.
Not nearly enough people going to shows.
Second, demand is steadily dropping right now.
This was predictable as well for a number of reasons:
Too much inventory.
The data shows that people are afraid to go out while so much of the population refuse to get vaccinated.
People’s behaviors and priorities have changed.
Third, the secondary market often boosts the “tickets distributed” numbers of the primary market.
I forget the exact number, but I want to say it was around 55%, which was often shared to represent the number of tickets that go below face value on the secondary market. That actually seems low to me, but folks will probably email me a better number after this.
This does a few things:
It boosts sales numbers without reflecting real demand.
It harms the customer experience.
It decreases the perception of value around the live experience.
Finally, Eric makes a great case for a civil society.
Eric is a trained lawyer so I’m not surprised that he is making a case for the need for rules and responsibilities.
I’m with Eric on this one.
I’m not moved by the “freedom” arguments for not getting vaccinated because part of living in a community is we have a responsibility to the folks around us. Your “freedoms” aren’t free reign to impose a cost on the rest of society. It is about commitment, teamwork, and shared effort like any great team.
We are seeing what a lack of feeling of shared responsibility is costing us in the form of recovery from the pandemic, continued spread of the virus in too many places, and many places where society seems to be pulled at the seams.
Shared responsibilities look like this:
Seatbelts
Smallpox vaccines
Libraries
Highways
And, much more.
Moving on, what about this matters to all of us?
Let me give you three things to take away here:
First, strategy before tactics.
I’m almost embarrassed that it seems like so many people spent little or no time on their strategies.
Tactics, sure.
Maybe even the false idea that they needed a “Facebook strategy” or some such.
But the strategy is missing in so many cases.
So the first thing you need to do is come up with a strategy.
I’ve come up with a simple formula called CFA which is:
Choice
Focus
Action
You can also think through strategy in this way like Roger Martin talks about:
“Where will you compete?”
“How will you win?”
So, get your strategy straight…
Second, think about the 4 Ps:
Product
Price
Place
Promotion
Package the event the right way. Price according to the data. Create a distribution strategy that you can stick with. And, know how you are going to promote your tickets.
Third, never forget your brand.
Lady A isn’t winning by having tickets selling cheap on the internet.
The Anaheim Angels aren’t winning with $3 tickets in September.
The Raiders aren’t winning with 25% of their seats selling on the secondary market right before a game.
Remember, the lesson this week is that everything is branding. Everything is marketing. And, everything counts.
5. Links to close the week:
The American Enterprise Institute’s economist calls for antitrust enforcement against Live Nation: Antitrust enforcement’s return has created some strange bedfellows, that’s for sure. I started out having this as a main story, but there isn’t much to talk about here that I haven’t already covered. So just recognize that the drumbeat on antitrust enforcement is growing and it will impact everyone in some way if action is taken.
The Demons sell 3 years of merchandise in 2 weeks: Did you think I’d miss the chance to celebrate my Melbourne Demons winning the Grand Final by the largest margin in AFL history? Have you been paying attention?
Singapore is hosting the AFF Suzuki Cup: My deep ties to Singapore are finally going to pay off. This will be a big opportunity to help boost Singapore out of the pandemic’s lockdowns and show off the city/state.
Aladdin on Broadway has to postpone a show due to breakthrough Covid cases: As we’ve discussed before, up and down. Two steps forward, one back is going to be common for a while.
Check out my Linktree! Links to everything!
Booking Protect has shared data that shows over 30% of consumers are taking up refund protection since tickets have gone on sale after lockdowns. That’s behavioral data pointing you to the reality that people want that peace of mind. Give Booking Protect a call and find out how you can give your customers what they want and create a new revenue stream for your business.
I put together an NPS worksheet with the folks at Eventellect. Send me an email and I’ll share it with you so that you can learn the power of NPS to help you know what your customers love about you and how you can deliver even more value.
Activity Stream has a new email marketing tool, Activate. This tool helps you reconnect with your market and drive sales as things reopen. Check out Activity Stream and find out how you can connect with your audience and get back to giving them magic moments.