Talking Tickets 10 Sept 2021: Opera Carolina! $3 Tickets and Pricing! More Soccer! MORE!!!!!
Number 101!!
Ahhh, yes!
On today’s 101st edition, I’ll take you through the Dave 101 of ideas.
I won’t but there are some stories that really drill home some of the core ideas I try to teach y’all in my talks, workshops, consulting, podcasts, and writing.
BTW, I’m in San Francisco next week with a free day on Wednesday. I’ve never been to SF before so send me your suggestions.
If you haven’t already, I’d appreciate a bit of quick feedback from y’all.
Can you share the newsletter with a colleague or friend that might benefit from it?
To the Tickets!
P.S. Since y’all were following my efforts to go to the Foo Fighters at 9:30 Club: F Yeah! Great show!
1. The Angels sell $3 tickets throughout September…this brings up some interesting price questions:
Big Ideas:
Strategy before tactics. The first step is a step back.
The 4 Ps still matter.
Brand equity is slow to build and fast to destroy.
Ah, this story is just the perfect story for this newsletter.
Without even knowing this, I actually can give you the entire Dave masterclass in one story.
Let’s see how we do.
First off, I wouldn’t technically call this a discount. I’d say that this is actually a repricing of certain very specific tickets for the final month of the season. But, by waiting until September, the impact of this repricing is likely limited.
Second, discounts still destroy your brand.
While this might not functionally be a discount in the customer’s mind, it probably has a similar impact.
I don’t want to say 100% without data, but remember the conversation we’ve had over the last few months about post-price perception. Perception of the value of your product is what drives a person’s willingness to pay.
The customer decides the value, you don’t.
More than anything, this story brings out my full thinking and learning on marketing over the years because it highlights a few key ideas:
The importance of Market Orientation
The power of Market Research
STP
The 4 Ps
Building strong brands
A quick primer on Dave’s Marketing Strategy 101 course, coming soon to a location near you.
First point, the first step in any strategy or marketing effort is a step back. You have to get the diagnosis correct at the outset to ensure that your efforts are heading in the right direction.
The jumping-off point is Market Orientation.
Market Orientation is the idea that you recognize that what you “think” you know the customer wants is likely wrong without some research to back it up.
Pretty simple stuff…you work to bring your customer’s voice into the organization before you start making decisions.
Second, the power of market research.
Market research takes many forms from small to large.
Ethnography is typically my starting point. This is a fancy word for going out and seeing how people actually use your product or service.
From there, move to small group stuff like individual conversations, focus groups, and other small group activities.
At the small group level, you just want to listen for experiences and patterns that show up so that you can formulate a hypothesis.
Finally, you go big in the form of surveys, phonebanks, or other tools that allow you to reach a representative sample of your market.
The key here is that gaining a representative sample of your market is often simpler than you think it is.
Use Google. There are tons of calculators out there to help you find out the representative sample.
I looked up how many folks I needed for a representative sample of the District of Columbia and it was 384 folks. Then I went and did the same thing for New York City, 385.
Moving on to STP, the holy trinity of marketing.
Segmentation is drawing a map of the total population of your potential market, based on behavior.
You want to be able to see how people behave when you look at your segmentation. And, if you’ve done a good job, you can often name specific customers that you know that fit the name.
Targeting is the beginning of your strategy because it requires you to make a choice.
To target effectively, you have to look at your map and pick the best target or targets of opportunity.
In a lot of cases, it is obvious.
A word of caution, too many folks try to avoid the picking part, but most of us have limited resources. So you have to choose. In my work, I try to stick to 1 or 2 targets, but depending on what you are doing…you can go as high as 3.
After that, you haven’t really picked anything.
You are flinging poop.
When you position, you need to keep two ideas in your mind about your position in the market:
Are you positioning about your business?
Are you positioning against your competition?
One of two choices, about you or against your competition.
A point of failure is when people try to do both. You end up stuck in the middle and you are mushy and meaningless.
Don’t do that.
All of this allows you to build a strategy with custom sales funnels built on your data, SMART objectives, and creating plans that will be delivered on by your tactics.
Remember, strategy before tactics!
Always!
My most important rule.
The 4 Ps have become a bit controversial in certain parts of the marketing world over the last decade.
Why?
Because most marketers suck and they’ve chased knuckleheads around trying to catch each shiny new bauble and “must-have” tool while undermining their relevance.
The 4 Ps are just a framework for making sure you think through your tactical delivery of your strategy completely.
The 4 Ps are:
Product
Price
Place
Promotion
They all matter and they all fit together.
Going back to why most marketers suck: too many have bought the belief that all marketing is just the promotion p. And, that couldn’t be further from the truth.
A quick overview for today:
Product comes in three forms: core benefit, actual product, and the augmented product. You can create bundles or unbundle. The core benefit is the key because the customer defines value, you don’t.
Price is the MVP moment of marketing because that’s where you capture some of the value you’ve created through your marketing efforts. Pricing properly demands research.
Place is distribution. Make this decision consciously, direct or indirect. Where do you want your products to show up? In our context, tickets…what is your secondary market strategy? Do you want one? Have one? Direct strategy? Sales teams? Partners?
Promotion is about just that, getting the word out. What promotional tools are going to help you reach your strategic goals? You don’t have to be everywhere. You have to go where your audience is likely to be. Remember, if you go to Pinterest to advertise to me, you are likely in the wrong spot.
Finally, brand value.
Your brand is the accumulation of every interaction your market has had with you, good and bad.
The good stuff adds up slowly and the bad stuff erodes brand value quickly.
Those are the rules, I don’t make them up.
Everything you do in your business is marketing and brand building or brand destroying.
So let’s draw this back to the $3 tickets, but more importantly, the current environment in the live entertainment business.
Price is the MVP moment in marketing because that is where you capture some of the value you’ve created. In too many places, we’ve seen the reflexive, old strategies rolled out and are expected to work in a new environment.
Then, when the strategies aren’t working, discounting and price-based promotions jump in.
This $3 ticket promotion says less about the Angels than it does about the business model of ticket sales that still seems to be hanging on of rolling out one price at the beginning of the season and using price promotions to “fix” things after the fact.
As an example, Premier League teams have price schedules with a bit of flexibility in them and they only put tickets on-sale within about a month of each match, allowing greater flexibility in pricing.
At the same time, it requires a stronger emphasis on fan development through list building, email marketing, and content management.
Having some flexibility in the sales process and the on-sale process is likely key here.
This situation also calls out for more teams to focus on doing their own research. The reports and data that come from a league level are great resources, but are probably also somewhat limited because the average is an awful way to run your business. If you stand me next to my neighbor, Jeff Bezos, the average net worth is going to be $100 B. If you look at the average price or performance of the DC/Baltimore market, you are likely to get useless information. They are two different worlds.
Get out of the average.
Finally, you have to focus on the overall level of brand engagement in your market because in this case, the Angels have two of the most exciting players in baseball with Mike Trout and Shohei Otani.
You can build some significant brand equity around those two players.
To me, I’m not as down on the Angels on this one as everyone might think because it is a straight re-pricing of certain sections and seats without a discount or some other promotion attached to it.
But this situation does highlight the headwinds that organizations around the world are going to be dealing with for the next 18 months and it emphasizes the reality that everyone is going to have to follow the data, be creative, and be willing to not be stuck in the way things have always been done.
2. FIFA wants to hold a World Cup every two years:
Big Ideas:
This is an issue of quality or quantity.
Players are being treated like commodities at this point with so much soccer that injuries are becoming more common.
A bi-annual World Cup reminds me of how hot interleague play was in MLB and how quickly it became not a big deal.
I like the idea that I get to promote The Guardian’s soccer podcast this morning because it has brought me great joy during the lockdowns and the pandemic. It is a nice mix of serious soccer, silliness, and Jonathan Wilson to inform and entertain.
Also, I thought they did a great job of breaking down the ideas driving the rumor of “investigating” a bi-annual World Cup.
First off, this is a prime example of a “floater”. Meaning that FIFA used Arsene Wegner and his reputation as a shield to float this idea to see if there was really any stomach for it.
If you go back to the European Super League idea, this is the opposite of what was done there.
Second, this is the prime example of commodity thinking in action where quality takes a backseat to quantity.
As we all know, more isn’t always better, it is just more.
That’s what I think is most worrisome about this idea, it takes an event that causes the world to stand still and wants to water it down because somewhere TV executives are whispering “content” in someone’s ear.
From a strategy standpoint, let’s run this one through “The Power Framework” and see what comes out.
As a refresher, “The Power Framework” says that a modern strategy should be seen through the lens of gaining power over the competition, customers, and suppliers.
In thinking this through, we see that FIFA’s idea does the following:
It weakens the World Cup against the competition because if you have a World Cup every two years, you are fighting the Olympics and regional tournaments like the Euros. Not to say that you are also competing more regularly for attention during the summer holidays in the northern hemisphere.
This idea also weakens FIFA against its partners in the form of TV, players, and partners. Ricardo Fort points out that activating an event like this takes tons of resources and is a multi-year process for the partners and this might make them balk. The same goes for the TV partners. Right now, the World Cup is a huge event but if it rolls around every two years, does it become more like an average mid-December bowl game? Finally, the players will be expected to do more with less downtime making injuries more likely or non-participation less likely.
As for the customers, the customers win here as well because they will just have more content to choose from and less incentive to make space in their schedules for these matches. Look at the ratings during the period when so many sports came back out of lockdowns, it seems like everything was down because there was so much going on.
The key to this idea is that it looks like what the kids would call “Late Stage Capitalism” where more is more and that is all that matters.
I’m far from cynical, but even I can look at this and say the big driver of this idea is money. And, it is likely being exacerbated by the way that soccer is spread across several organizations around the world.
From my POV, the soccer calendar is pretty crowded now and it can become problematic to keep up with following my team now, forget if I want to coach the boy’s team, or watch my Alabama football.
If I had to put my revenue hat on, I’d say FIFA would win some significant revenue at the start, but slowly the value would erode.
Sometimes, more isn’t better…it is just more.
3. Edinburgh Fringe Festival does better than expected:
Big Ideas:
The Edinburgh Fringe Festival pulled it off! Their first festival since 2019! This is a Dave bucket list event.
Growth for the Fringe means growing the community.
Being creative to recover is key.
I love the Edinburgh Fringe Festival and I had planned to go during the 2020 festival, but y’all know how that went.
What is great to see is that the Fringe Festival was able to go off in 2021. And, from all reports, this year’s event was a success.
Why I’m highlighting this story today is one big thing, the way that the Fringe Festival is defining successful growth going forward: community growth, not just revenue.
I highlight this because it comes back to the key idea of having the right goals and objectives.
In my nightclub days, I used to say that if I could get the right audience I could get money out of them and I proved that over and over with some of the most ridiculous ideas around like:
Ladies drink free, EVERY NIGHT! (During Spring Break!)
Everyone drinks free, EVERY NIGHT! (Again, Spring Break!)
“What kind of gin do you prefer?” (No one wants a well gin and tonic!)
The point is that if you do the right research, you’ll be able to draw a picture of your market that shows you how people behave. In a lot of instances, when you do this segmentation, you’ll see opportunities that you might never have even imagined existed to you because you were looking at some less effective form of segmentation like demographics, zip code, or straight income.
In the case of the Fringe, focusing on growing the community is straight-up behavioral segmentation and if I were to look at their segmentation map, I’m pretty sure that they’ve named their segments and that the audience that’s into going to some sort of festival like this is pretty large and hasn’t been completely activated.
That’s really what everyone’s segmentation should look like and do.
Show you the hole in the market that you can fill better than anyone else.
Is it always clean or absurdly obvious?
No.
But it is something we should all strive to achieve.
Also, if you have a spare bit of change…support the Fringe’s emergency appeal. Relaunching and re-opening isn’t recovery.
4. The Charlotte Opera and the Charlotte Ballet teach us creativity in the face of the pandemic:
Big Ideas:
My popular refrain of embracing change is alive in Charlotte.
Innovation helped a lot of businesses get through the pandemic lockdowns with a bit more ease than others.
Going forward, focus on audience development and audience expansion. There are tremendous opportunities there.
I don’t have to tell anyone that reads this newsletter that the last year and a half was tough on people in live entertainment. It was brutal for almost everyone no matter what spot they hold in the ecosystem.
But the past year has been especially troubling for the arts, opera, ballet, and other performing arts in small and mid-sized venues and markets for a number of reasons including name recognition at the national level, the sheer number of venues that were shuttered, and business models that needed to be updated on the fly.
With the name of the game becoming survival, we’ve seen organizations get creative to survive with ideas like:
More aggressively managing and guarding cash on hand.
Using furloughs and government assistance to protect jobs or reduce payroll while helping with benefits.
Changing presentations and business models to account for what is possible not just what was normal.
At the end of the day, this piece highlights different paths and mindsets to survival and recovery.
To me, the creativity of the business models and the ability to adapt has been a testament to the industry and people within the industry. Where we’ve also seen a lot of places that white-knuckled it and came out of the lockdowns with their old business model still intact, even if it isn’t working.
The lessons that all of us should be looking at and applying from these situations include:
A willingness to adjust our business model to meet the demands of today. Look at the Carolina Opera’s innovations during the pandemic or the New York Philharmonic. Include that with the examples from sports clubs around the world like the Australian Football League’s membership drive.
Expand the value you have offered partners previously. One challenge I’ve been working on tackling with some partners is how to maximize and expand the value of partnerships. We’ve had numerous conversations about how to make the sponsorship and activation process more effective, more valuable, and more creative so that people can gain more value from their partnerships. This is an exciting territory and it can rescue your business.
Be willing to combine the old and new in ways that you might not have imagined previously. The adaptation of digital doesn’t have to be an only during the pandemic solution. It could be a way to expand your reach. The same way that Opera Australia took the opera into new communities during the pandemic. Or, the way that the Diablo Ballet has taken the ballet into neighborhoods all over San Francisco. Go beyond the normal.
5. The UK approves the viagogo/StubHub merger:
Big Ideas:
The integration of viagogo and StubHub can begin.
In the face of a challenging market, competition for ticket buyers can go one of several ways.
Ticket resale is a developing business outside of the United States with lots of challenges from governments and consumer advocacy groups around the world.
The merger that seemed like it would never end has now come to a resolution with the CMA approving the merger of viagogo and StubHub due to viagogo agreeing to divest StubHub’s international business.
To me, this seems like a pretty good outcome for viagogo because of a few key reasons:
The secondary market is still developing in most nations outside of North America.
Brand StubHub isn’t as strong in international markets, meaning that the acquiring fund will need to invest money in the brand, educating the market, and customer acquisition to really fulfill the opportunity of their acquisition.
In many markets, the secondary market and for-profit resale is under attack by consumer advocates and governments, making a tough market even tougher.
This story is interesting because no one really knows what the ticket industry is going to look like in six months and this deal is a relic of the before times.
As I’ve reminded y’all over and over, humans have gotten together to sing, dance, cheer, and watch for as long as we’ve been on Earth.
But we don’t really know what this is going to mean going forward because we don’t have a full understanding of when we will be able to put the pandemic officially behind us.
Recent stats and surveys tell a tale of societies and countries that is torn with one foot in recovery and one foot in the pandemic:
Over one-third of ticket buyers are purchasing refund protection according to data from Booking Protect.
US companies added only 235,000 jobs in August, pointing to a slowing in recovery activity.
Delta variant cases are increasing rapidly and the numbers look worse in a lot of places than they did at this time last year when we didn’t have vaccines, didn’t have as much data, and were in the middle of a lot of social unrest.
Customer willingness to attend crowded events seems to be slipping. But in places like the UK, soccer matches and early musical productions are selling well. In the States, we’ve seen lots of fans at college football games and a Foo Fighters’ show at the 9:30 Club sell out in moments.
This just highlights that the coming integration of viagogo and StubHub can go one of several ways.
First, you could see a deep discount strategy where all of the companies compete to win customers over with low-costs on both sides of the transaction, consumer and reseller.
Second, you could see innovation in the way the customers are won and kept. Think of the way that Vivid Seats has introduced a rewards program with purchase incentives.
Finally, a new way of reaching and selling in the secondary market could emerge based on the number of seats available, the coronavirus’s continued impact, and unpredictable economic circumstances.
What we do know with certainty is that after such a long period of time in limbo, the combined viagogo/StubHub team is going to be looking at making moves quickly to re-establish their strength in the market, win over customers and resale partners, and to claw back market share.
What will be interesting is watching that play out.
——————————————————
Connect with all the Dave stuff on my Linktree link: podcasts, newsletters, blogs, and more!
Recently, in a one-month period, Booking Protect saw almost 67% of ticket buyers take up refund protection. That’s amazing! And, as people have continued to emerge from pandemic lockdowns, they are still seeing over 1/3 of folks buy refund protection, pointing to the fact that people want the security of knowing there is a way to protect their purchases. Hook up with the team including Hayley, Cat, Simon, and Cath!
A friend of mine on the secondary market is looking for someone to lead their buying team. This is a remote position. If you are looking to work in the secondary market, let me know and I can connect y’all.
Now is a good time to do some market research. So send me an email and I will share the Net Promoter Score worksheet I put together with my friends at Eventellect. We help you understand NPS and put together your own survey, just like this one!
Activity Stream is opening an American office and that means I’m going to have another American office for y’all to find me in. Check out the new tool, Activate, designed to help you do email marketing better.