Talking Tickets 11 December 2020: The Future of Talking Tickets! Tennis Rebrands! Australian Sports Business! And, More!
Year 2 Number 13
Hey There!
One of the final Happy Hours of the year tonight at 5 PM with me, Ken Troupe, and Matt Wolff! Join us!
Happy Holidays everyone!
Happy Hanukkah, if you are celebrating!
How’s everyone holding up? If you need or want to chat with someone, just reply to the email and let me know.
You can jump in our Slack Channel! About 250 ticket folks from around the world are in there, networking and chatting.
BTW, I’m going to do a few more free team talks on marketing, sales, and strategy next week. The first 3 folks that send me a note and we can work out a time, I’m happy to do a FREE talk, training, webinar thing for your team over the next week or so.
I’m going to do an experiment here: Can you answer these 3 questions for me? (I’m going to show you something with the answers in the January 1st newsletter.)
To the Tickets!
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1. Not a ticket story to start:
Brian Morrissey writes a good newsletter on publishing and business models.
As we sit here for the next to last, non-holiday edition of the newsletter for the year, I wanted to take a moment to reflect on 2020 and share a few ideas about where I will put the attention of this newsletter going forward into the recovery from the pandemic.
Brian creates a framework which I’ll walk through because it illustrates and points me in a direction.
Simple editorial vision: For a long time, I’ve been focusing on the need to market and sell better, focus on people.
As we head through the pandemic and into the end of the pandemic, my editorial vision for this newsletter and the work I’ll do around tickets, events, strategy, and marketing will focus on three words: Recover! Relaunch! Reinvent!
Find your lens: My lens here has been that you can’t take the customer for granted and we need to be a bit more sophisticated in our marketing, selling, and strategy.
Going forward, I’m looking at the world through the lens of pandemics and that a crisis of this nature accelerate changes in our society and culture that we aren’t always aware of. This means that we have to look deeper at the world around us to be able to make the best decisions from often confusing data and signals.
Run to the complicated: For a long time, the branding that I would use was “The Revenue Architect”. I would take the complicated ways that we make money and try to simplify them.
In that regard, I’ll work to dig deeper on topics that are going to impact the business and industry like next week’s podcast episode with Sean Kelly from Vatic where we cover a case study and data on dynamic pricing of digital events.
Run a playbook: I’ll have to work on this a little bit, but at least in the format of the newsletter and podcast, I’m going to work on teaching, case studies, and analysis.
To turn it back to the world of tickets and entertainment, this framework is pretty god for all of us to think on right now.
The vision could be the people you want to serve or how you want to deliver value.
Your POV can be a point of differentiation. Think about the conversation about tickets and where tickets are sold as commodities versus valuable experiences.
Complicated. There’s so much that likely doesn’t make sense or that you can work to simplify for your customers.
Create a playbook is simply how will you deliver your value?
2. Professional tennis rebrands to come out of the pandemic:
I’ve been pretty clear for years that I think that teams, leagues, arts organizations…actually everyone, needs to do a better job of marketing themselves.
I did a talk at the National Sports Forum yesterday on segmentation, targeting, and positioning.
The tail end, I showed how strategy feeds tactics and how the 4 Ps work with your strategy to deliver results.
In case you need a refresh, the 4 Ps are product, price, place, and promotion.
Let’s discuss another concept of marketing today: Market Orientation.
This means as a marketer, you work to get the voice of the customer from the outside of the organization into the organization because there is often a disconnect between the front-line folks that deal directly with the customers and the executives that are making the decisions.
There are 3 competing orientations that I talk about when I discuss this:
Advertising Oriented
Sales Oriented
Product Oriented
These tennis rebrands are a good example of what happens when you let your message drive you without having done the difficult work of orienting your business around the customer, doing proper research, and understanding value. Or, in marketing speak, when you are Advertising Oriented.
The story on the ATP’s website is pretty informative of what it means to be advertising oriented and product oriented without an understanding of the value that your customer derives from your product.
The emphasis is on the product on the court and the new message, not on the value that the customer gains.
In Product Orientation, you think the job of marketing is to educate the customer. And, you create a product and try and lead your customers to the conclusion that they need whatever it is you are selling.
This can work, but the hits are few and far between.
The danger in these situations is that if you aren’t careful, you allow your organization to make decisions based on what you think. You guess. Real marketers don’t guess. They follow the customer and the data.
Remember rule number one of marketing, “You aren’t your market.” This means that your opinion of what you think people want or should want doesn’t matter.
For all of us that are working to sell tickets and relaunch our businesses now, the key for all of us is to step back far enough to see what our customers want, desire, and enjoy.
So we can offer them products and services that fit the desires and needs that they have.
Not the other way around, making something up and trying to educate them on why they need it or should want it.
It can work. But, again, the hits are few and far between.
3. Live Nation President Expects Summer of 2021 We’ll See Big Shows:
I realize that the job of a corporate executive is to pump up the stock price by doing media, but still…
Joe Berchtold was on CNBC this week talking about the return of live entertainment in a big way. I’m as much of an optimist as anyone, but being overly optimistic at this point seems unwise.
Not because it is bad to be an optimist but because we’ve yet to see any one of these best case scenarios play out during the pandemic.
I’ll prefer the cautiously optimistic route or the middle of the road route myself.
As I’ve shared with y’all throughout this, look to the countries that are ahead of us to find out what we can do to wrestle this to the ground.
This week I read an analysis of the reasons that Asia, Australia, and New Zealand have been doing better with the pandemic that has stuck with me. I can’t find the article now, but the hypothesis was that in the countries in the East, the goal from the outset was to do everything possible to eradicate the virus. Not to get it under control, but to eliminate it.
Compare that with the western countries that have been in various forms of shutdown or opening and closing for almost a year. Causing us to be in this middle area where we can’t really make decisions or move forward in any meaningful way because the virus is still out of control in far too many places.
I bring all of this up because the reality is that what is holding back events, the economy, and much of what constitutes normal for many of us is the fact that the virus is still out of control in too many places. Until we have it under control, people are going to act with fear and trepidation.
That was born out in the McKinsey study I shared a week or two ago and it is born out in people’s actions.
For every one person you see whooping it up at a bar, you likely see 5-6 that are hiding out, social distancing, and limiting their contact with folks to try and avoid getting sick.
I highlight this because we can’t just assume that demand will snap back like nothing happened.
We can’t assume that just because events are going to be on-sale that folks are going to just buy like they have previously.
In general, we shouldn’t make any assumptions.
We still don’t know what the roll out of the vaccine will look like and how quickly we will be able to get enough folks vaccinated to reach herd immunity.
We still don’t know what the financial downturn will really look like when things can begin to return to normal.
And, we still have no idea how folks’ habits will be impacted by the pandemic.
We have a lot of unknowns that we need to deal with. To pretend otherwise would be unwise because the more responsive and proactive about dealing with current challenges head-on we are, the more likely we will be to recover quickly and well.
Unfortunately, the best-case scenario hasn’t worked out for us yet. So I’m going to stick with the saying, “Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice…I can’t get fooled again.”
4. There is a $500M hole from the pandemic in Australian sports:
We have seen a lot of stories about business models and financial losses the last few months.
Some of them have been incredibly surprising like how in-debt a lot of college athletic departments are in the US, the challenges of refunds for tickets in the States, the struggles to get a lifeline for businesses in the arts in the UK, and more.
But if you look at the world of Australian sports business, I think we see a lot of really tough, but smart business decisions that happened this year.
What is interesting in watching Australian sports deal with this challenge is the term, “reset”.
We’ve seen costs righted, reallocation of resources, refocusing of attention, and a lot of positives that weren’t easy, but necessary.
What can all of us learn no matter what industry we are in or what country?
I’ll give you one big thing.
One, focus on the long-term.
At the bottom of the article, Josh Blanksby from the MRC, talks about being able and willing to focus on the long-term.
This is valuable.
Like I mentioned above, we can’t assume folks are going to rush back and things are going to be the same as they ever were.
We are going to need to think about recovery as a process that may take a couple of years which is the viewpoint of Tennis Australia as next year’s Australian Open is likely to be impacted by the virus.
This means, yes, get folks back as soon as possible, but realize that recovery is likely to be a long-term project.
Which is a big change from the way many folks have had to do business for the last few years where the focus has been much too short-term in nature.
A few things on sponsorship, branding, and advertising to close out the week.
First, I dig the way Burger King is sponsoring a lower level football team and are rebranding their logo with the name “Burger Queen” for the women’s team.
I’m not big on brand purpose because BS. A rule of thumb, Brand Purpose is BS unless it costs you real money. Like Patagonia closing on Black Friday, that’s Brand Purpose that would count. Rolling out some pretty words, not so much.
Just check out this clip from HBO.
But I do believe a great deal in representation and attention which this effort by Burger King represents.
It is good marketing for Burger King, but the more important thing it does is continues a year where women’s sports has received a lot more attention and we’ve seen the interest in the WNBA and NWSL grow significantly in the States, we’ve seen the Women’s Premier League’s profile elevated, and women’s sports around the world started to gain traction with audiences around the world.
I coach my son’s rec team at his elementary school. We have two girls that play with the boys. I know from chatting with them how important it is to see women and women’s sports getting attention.
Representation matters and having role models that look like you matters.
On the other hand, the link at the top talks about brands using their Super Bowl ads to address big societal issues.
Please don’t.
All of this nonsense about consumers wanting their brands to have purpose comes out of poorly written surveys. The research shows that about 75% of consumers can’t name a purposeful brand.
The job of marketing is to make profit.
I’m all for a brand or business doing something around a social issue if they are willing to commit to support the effort with something more than words. To go back to the top and tie in with the example of the tennis rebranding, if you only talk about what you are doing and don’t change anything, that’s advertising oriented.
To take this a step further, you are trying to say you think so little of your customers that you expect that they won’t notice that you never really followed through on your words.
My take is…definitely do something if you are going to follow through. Don’t pay lip service to things you have no intention of offering up any solutions for.
That’s true for life as well.
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I’m still in DC!
Check out the podcast stream. I had Alex Sinatra on this week to talk about entrepreneurship, strategy and marketing, focus, and contrarianism. Check her out!
Also, the episode with Sean Kelly is going up on Monday since I just ran out of time and I don’t like to post episodes on Friday. It is a really good one with a case study on what Sean and Vatic have learned about dynamic pricing and virtual events during the pandemic. Really surprising data came back.
Visit my website and check out the blog!
Great stuff going on with We Will Recover. Lots of ideas around recovery and reinvention! Check ‘em out.
As we work through the pandemic, you likely need to do that market orientation thing and see what will be on your customer’s minds when it comes time to buy tickets. They likely are going to want some security, some certainty, and some peace of mind around their purchase…so check out Booking Protect, if you haven’t already considered refund protection, now is a good time to investigate it.