Talking Tickets 10 June 2022: US Men's Soccer! IndyCar's Position! Fake Tickets! And, More!
#139
Hi!
Still, a few slots remaining for the group version of “The Whiteboard Workshop” in NYC on 12 September 2022.
You will get the full experience focusing on actions, accountability, and goal setting.
Historically, some of the highlights for folks include:
The one-to-one accountability that you gain post-workshop.
The clarity around their value proposition and where they want their business to focus.
The clear action items that are immediately actionable.
For many folks that have taken the workshop with their team, they can see a 35%+ growth in revenue and profitability in under 60 days.
I’m going to open spaces exclusively for ‘Talking Tickets’ readers and subscribers until June 15th for $250. Email me and I will get you signed up.
The Dave world tour is looking at adding a stop in the UK in September: London, Manchester, and Liverpool.
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To the Tickets!
1. The Big Story: Christian Pulisic complains about attendance at a friendly:
Big Ideas:
US Soccer has a premium approach to how they price and sell tickets.
Empty seats have been an issue unless the team is playing Mexico.
“Growing the game”: what does that mean?
I’m on the board of the boy’s soccer club in DC. This means that I’m close to the idea of “growing the game” and if you ask me what I think of youth sports or the development of sports at the youth and younger folks level…I’m not going to give you a very rosy opinion on the environment, at all.
To me, “growing the game” means teaching people to love the game, and have a way to experience the game physically, emotionally, and intellectually.
For US Soccer, right now should be a high point for the national team, heading into a World Cup with a high profile set of opponents. But the national team can’t seem to buck business side issues infiltrating everything that goes on around the team.
This started with the pay issue between the men’s national team and the women’s national team. Now we are seeing it with attendance and pricing.
It has been evident for some time that the approach to selling the men’s national team was to have a premium approach and that this was always going to lock people out.
Where the challenge arises is how that conflicts with the message about “growing the game”.
As with any sport, there are going to be matchups that sell no matter what happens as is the case with any match involving the Mexican national team playing in the United States.
I get the reaction to “create” a home-field advantage by using technology to root out some of the Mexican fans that would cheer for Mexico, but a better way of achieving a home-field advantage might be to build one in the States by growing the game, making the matches accessible for more people, and creating an environment that is unique to US Soccer.
While this isn’t a narrative as much…it is a collection of thoughts that I feel like I come back to from time to time.
For you to use:
Are you selling the right thing? Is premium your gig? Value? What is it?
Do you know what your market values are? How?
What can you do to create the experience you want to deliver for your customers?
2. The Road to Recovery: IndyCar vs. F1 teaches us about positioning:
Big Ideas:
Positioning is the essence of strategy. You choose what you are for or what you are against.
This strategy won’t be a miracle. We won’t know the success of this for another year or two.
Diagnosis is key to a strong strategy.
I like this one because it specifically raises the issue of positioning.
Positioning is the essence of strategy because it requires you to make a choice. You are for something or you are against your competition. The choice drives your strategy.
In this case, IndyCar is making sure that they are “accessible” versus F1 which they point to as being “elite”.
Granted, I’d be more into the “elite” stuff, but that’s me.
It is this choice that drives their strategic decision-making process.
How do they get there?
This is maybe the most important part of the whole process because it points to the ability of IndyCar to do a good job of diagnosis.
Getting your diagnosis right is a real key to a successful strategy and successful marketing campaigns.
An incomplete list of the things you should look at to complete your diagnosis:
Secondary research
Historical campaigns and research
Founders
Competition
Focus groups
And, on…
Doing a proper and thorough job of diagnosing your situation will help decide the success or failure of your strategy. I’m going to look at putting together a webinar or something around doing a proper diagnosis in the fall.
All of this is to get to the point of asking the question: “When will we know if this position is successful?”
The answer is going to be unsatisfying to the quick-fix crowd, but it is likely going to be another year or two before we can tell whether or not the IndyCar strategy is working.
Why is that?
First, the Penske team took over IndyCar in January 2020. Without a pandemic, the first year is already a wash because that’s the old team’s work.
A new team is going to want to go in and do their work and set their strategy. This means they are stuck with the old strategy for 6-12 months, depending on their calendar.
Second, any strategy that has a significant positioning angle or heavy brand work, which this one seems to include, is going to need time to work.
I’ve written about the through line over the years and that means that you have to deliver on your brand promise and position consistently for a few years to begin to see the real impact of your work.
You might get some short-term sales activation results, but those taper off if you don’t consistently spend time and resources on your brand.
Remember, the long and short. You can’t do brand or sales activation. To achieve maximum impact, you must do both.
Like Colin Lewis mentioned in a post I shared on LinkedIn, I’m confident in the position IndyCar has picked. But the truth is that none of us can tell you with certainty if it will pan out.
Action Items:
Know your position. Are you for something or against the competition? Make the choice.
Do some diagnostics on your business. Start by looking around at secondary research that you can find on the internet. If you get deep into that, maybe you want to start talking with customers next.
Understand that any strategy you take action on that includes significant brand building will require 2-3 years before you have the full scope of the impact. You should see results from your sales activation work in year 1, but you’ll not know the full impact of your plan until year 3 or so.
3. How To: Brand Matters in sports and any organization:
Big Ideas:
A strong brand helps you gain pricing integrity.
A strong brand helps you build loyalty.
A strong brand helps you generate demand.
I like this piece from Jess Smith because she’s thought about branding and brands a lot.
I’m one of those folks that she talks about lumping this whole thing together, but let me explain why.
When I look at a brand, I look at the strategy as the overarching plan for the brand, and the codes, DNA, position, and the other elements service the strategic plan.
The other difference in our approach is that I don’t think your brand plan changes that often, you need a through-line in your strategy look at some of the great fashion brands like Burberry, Nike, and Louis Vitton where elements show up in their advertising and marketing over and over again throughout the years.
From an execution standpoint, there might be much less that separates us.
But the key to why you need to focus on your brand is threefold in the case of entertainment businesses:
Demand generation
Loyalty
Pricing integrity
Beginning with demand generation, brand building helps you ensure that there is demand for your product when it goes on sale.
Three important ways brand building helps generate demand:
Trust building
Creates a symbol of value
Generates differentiation
This is one reason that any band, team, orchestra, theatre, or show needs to think brand first because it can build a pathway to demand that might be difficult to create through short-term sales activation.
I know that too much of the industry is tactical, but at the root level brand building is essential.
Brand building helps build loyalty.
Why does loyalty matter?
Repeat purchases
Lifetime customer value
Easy examples are all around us.
There was an article I shared a long time ago about how Pearl Jam plays for three generations of fans. I heard a story recently about the foundation of one man’s lifelong love of the Red Sox and how his grandfather took him to his first Red Sox game at Fenway. Or, the folks that have seen Wicked 45 times.
These are clear examples that show that brand building can lead to some serious cash…through multiple purchases.
Finally, we have price integrity.
How does your brand help you maintain price integrity?
We could go through a lot here, but:
Your brand helps establish a marque meaning quality.
Branding helps you move away from being a commodity.
Branding creates a shorthand that often leads to purchasing.
The most important thing here is that your brand leaves a mark and if you do it well, it is a mark of quality.
Think about the way I’ve been focusing my brand on being focused, effective, and profitable. All of the ideas that flow out of here are built on making sure people spend less time doing things that cost them profits.
This means that I’ve moved from being a “consultant” to having a name brand. I’m not a commodity.
You don’t want to be a commodity because then the real decision is about price. This is where most entertainment businesses have found themselves now, a commodity. Where they’ve lost control over the conversation of the value of the performance, the impact of the event, and the value associated with attending in person.
Finally, if you’ve done the first two jobs well…this is often a shortcut to purchasing.
A strong brand acts as a shortcut to getting people to buy your product or service.
Why?
Because your brand represents value. And, when confronted with multiple choices, often the better brand wins.
Put this to work:
Decide what you want your brand to reflect? Commodity or distinct?
What attributes do you want your brand to have? Use my example of focused, effective, and profitable.
Why you? Is that coming through?
4. Tech/Tools/Profile: The Boss has ticket tech issues in Europe:
Big Ideas:
The Boss can still sell tickets.
Fans still get mad at Ticketmaster.
Pricing for big acts can still hold up.
This doesn’t need much analysis because it is like the world never changed in 2020.
The Boss announces a tour. Folks get excited. The tickets go on sale and they sell…fast.
At the same time, technology gets overwhelmed by the large number of folks trying to buy tickets during an on-sale, there is a tech hiccup, and fans get mad.
These two things are the same as they ever were.
The interesting thing in this story is that ticket sales for Bruce Springsteen show us a few big things about going forward:
People will buy early for a show they really care about.
Price will hold for high-impact shows.
Keeping saturation of the market down helps move tickets.
These are all positive lessons for folks in the industry and should help people make better decisions going forward.
Think, “Is this a hot show?”
“No.”
Then, maybe switch the mix on your product, price, or on-sale.
Maybe rethink the venue.
Just change the mix.
5. Links and Blurbs:
Wonderstruck in Cleveland offers $1 tickets: Scott Friedman asks me how I think they could do some sort of value-add without resorting to discounts. I posted my answer to LinkedIn.
Fake tickets at the Champions League Final? Yes, but not 40,000. Try 2,589: We all knew that the 40,000 ticket number was BS. I jumped right out and told everyone it would be less than 1% of the total. 2,589 is a not-insignificant number, but that’s less than a half of one percent. Try again that it was the ticket company’s fault.
Activity Stream makes an acquisition, wait they make two: My friends at Activity Stream step it up with two acquisitions to enable them to offer a more comprehensive solution to the ticket selling public. I’ll be having Martin make a return to the podcast next week to let us know what this means to everyone!
All-in pricing becomes the law of the land in NY State: Most folks remember the all-in pricing experiment by StubHub a few years back and how customers went with the lower initial price even when it meant paying more at checkout. This led StubHub to abandon the practice. This now makes the practice the law of the land in NY State. What will the unintended consequences of this be for ticket sellers and ticket buyers? Mike Guiffre breaks down the situation in great detail here.
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