Talking Tickets 14 May 2021: College Sports Business Model! The Future of MLB! The Crew Rebrand! And, More!
Number 84:
Hey There!
Did you get a chance to listen to Cormac on the podcast last week? He wants to know what folks think. He’s been asking me if he is the number one guest yet. (No.)
A really good mix of stories this week. I’m excited about this.
As we work our way out of the pandemic, I’m looking for your help to grow the newsletter so please share it with friends, colleagues, and co-workers.
I didn’t get to properly send off the Happy Hour, but last week was the final version! We started it to help people out when we were in serious lockdown and now that people can go out and drink in public…our work is done!
We will be doing something different in the fall around education and recovery, but we are still working out the details.
I’ve been taking a class on post-pandemic strategy through Cambridge University in the UK and we use case studies like all good business schools. I turned these weekly cases into an email. The first one is about Smythson’s discounts. It is a way for me to write about corporate strategy and the ideas from my coursework and share them.
So check it out!
To the Tickets!
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1. Sportico uncovers the numbers inside of Learfield’s college athletics deals:
Big Ideas:
What are your core competencies?
Business as usual isn’t likely to be realistic now.
Are you willing to take the first step to reimagine your business?
I’m starting out the week by kicking myself for editing out a prediction that I’d made in the post that I wrote about a month ago when the Nebraska rights’ deal first started making news.
At first, I wrote that “at a minimum” Nebraska was leaving 50% on the table working with an outside partner.
Lo and behold…it looks like my math was pretty good.
But the only one that knows I was right is the person I share these with to proofread. So you’ll have to believe me. Or, don’t.
As I dug through the report, I got onto the idea of core competencies. That’s at the heart of this issue now: what a team, school, or business does best and what should they not do at all.
The idea of core competencies is really simple.
It is an idea that first came into the world of management in the 1990s and stated that successful companies focus on a few core competencies that they develop so that they end up driving growth and profits.
A lot of what I see in the world of live entertainment points me towards a need for folks to get in touch with the core competencies that drive their business. And, if they don’t have any, to figure out what they can do to develop them.
If you are a college athletic department, what might your core competencies look like or need to be:
Getting people to attend games better be one.
Maintaining a relationship with your alumni, fans, and key stakeholders should be another.
Brand building is likely a good third one to develop.
In looking at the current state of college athletics and sports business, these core competencies aren’t always on display.
There is far too much outsourcing of these core ideas to partners that may or may not have goals aligned with yours. That may not have a core competency that aligns with the needs of your specific market and may be better suited to a more “general” overall theory of business.
Whatever the case may be, getting this right is imperative now.
How do you recognize your core competencies or the areas where you should be developing core competency?
Let’s start by looking at the 3 Cs:
Customer
Competition
Company
What do your customers want or need?
What is can you do better or different than your competition?
Finally, what can you deliver on now?
Start here. Then, work out from there.
Giving away 30%, 40%, or more of your revenue should be a wake-up call for folks. Most college athletic departments are struggling under the burden of debt, losses from the pandemic, or other challenges.
Couple those burdens with a new reality due to the pandemic that has left us all scratching our heads about what comes next and you’ll quickly realize that going back to “normal” isn’t likely feasible or advisable.
That’s not to say it isn’t a challenge because it is. But not starting to figure out your core competencies and focusing on them has to be a top priority.
2. The Columbus Crew rebrands, and, well…:
(I wrote this on Wednesday and by Wednesday night the Crew’s ownership had backtracked on the rebrand. But I’ll leave it so you can see what I got right and wrong.)
Big Ideas:
No brand is destined to be a commodity.
Your brand exists in your customer’s head.
Your brand is the accumulation of everything you do.
I’ve been able to cover a lot of branding ground with y’all the last few weeks.
As I may have mentioned on a number of instances, I’ve been doing research on my own and trying to make certain that the actions I take are consistent with the image I want to convey to the market.
For me: focused, effective, and profitable.
Am I achieving that?
That’s not up to me. That’s up to you.
The important thing to consider in this story is that your brand is the accumulation of all of the good and bad interactions that you’ve had with your market over their lifetime.
Good stuff adds up much more slowly than the bad stuff can tear things down.
A second idea here is that most rebrands fail. There is almost no upside to a rebrand and only pain as this situation in Columbus shows. Don’t believe me? Look at the outcry when Leeds United wanted to change their badge.
All of this comes after the battle to keep the crew in Columbus, the city and team building a new home for the club, and fans breathing a sigh of relief.
As the article above points out, too many sports teams in America seem determined to create homogenized brands, meant not to offend, but that’s not really a strong branding move.
In the case of Columbus, we can learn a very important lesson about the power of brands.
First, your brand is about stamping 3 or 4 images, words, or ideas onto your market’s brain. Again, your brand is the sum of everything, good or bad, that happens between you and your customers over time.
If you do your job well, you develop “brand equity”. That is just the difference between your brand and the commodity brand in your market.
My philosophy is that there are no such things as commodities because any and every brand can be differentiated and develop value.
But, remember the customer’s opinion on your brand matters, not yours.
Looking at all of this through the lens of the Crew, let’s focus on a few key ideas:
The brand is really owned by the customer because your brand only exists in your customer’s brain. You can say whatever you want, but you don’t impart meaning to your brand, your market does.
Distinctiveness in a brand is what everyone should be working towards. What does a distinct brand look like? Can you close your eyes and see the shape of a Coke bottle? The outline of the Sydney Opera House? The silhouette of the Empire State Building?
Undermining your brand undermines everything you do as a marketing organization. Why? Because everything about your business is built on a bed of perception.
The lesson here is don’t mess with your brand just because you think it is an easy solution to your marketing challenges or your sales efforts.
Most rebrands fail!
Without really knowing what is happening with the team, the justifications of aligning the brand with the city and the competitions seem a bit off considering the team just won an MLS Cup.
For my money, once I’ve won, I’m not changing anything. Minus putting my team and my logo next to championship everything and infusing winning into every aspect of the organization.
What can y’all learn that will help you with your brand and your branding efforts?
First, think about those few ideas that you want people to think of when they think of you.
We went over this with the Red Sox and their premium and group teams a few weeks ago.
Figure out what you want people to think of.
Second, figure out if what you want people to think of is manifesting itself in your customers’ minds.
How?
You should be doing some sort of brand tracking or surveying your market.
You can easily find out some of this using something like the survey that Eventellect used to find their Net Promoter Score. (Email me if you want the worksheet we put together that explains how to do a simple survey.)
The key is to find out perception. Your brand exists in the minds of your customers!
Remember that.
Finally, ask yourself if you are commoditizing your brand needlessly.
How do you do this?
Discounts
Lack of distinctive brand assets
Your communications are rare or inconsistent
Service is bad
I can go on
Keep these things in mind, be brutally honest with yourself, and take action immediately to fight back.
Remember, no brand is destined to be a commodity!
3. MLB’s future! What do we make of it?
Big Ideas:
Get the diagnosis right.
Strategy before tactics.
Flexibility in implementing your strategy is key.
I’m on record here talking about my love of baseball.
The times I’d sit in the bleachers in centerfield of Shea with the beer garden underneath, read the paper, watch the game, and drink beer on Sunday afternoons when I first moved to New York City is a true highlight to that first year or so I lived in the City.
So I’m emotionally invested in finding a way to get people to fall in love with baseball.
Is this an easy job?
No.
Is it impossible?
No.
Success nor failure is guaranteed.
Let me tell you why.
First, baseball is dealing with a challenge of a rapidly aging audience.
A lot of folks are dealing with this. Hence, the saying that many people whispered to me when I was heading to Australia in 2019 and looking to talk change with people from around Australia’s business community.
The saying, “Older and whiter isn’t a sustainable strategy.” I laughed at the time, but we do have to recognize that we can’t just focus on keeping the customers we have. We have to reach beyond them to our non-customers.
In any strategy work I do with a client, we spend an inordinate amount of time on diagnosis.
Why?
Because getting the diagnosis correct is essential to the success of your strategy.
And, most people can’t or won’t spend the time to do a diagnosis well. Then, they end up spinning their wheels, solving problems and not creating opportunities.
As an outsider, what I see is that baseball is getting pulled in a number of different directions at once:
Teams are becoming more dependent on revenue outside of their core business and this is stealing from their core competencies.
TV money is still growing on the national side but there is some strain at the regional level.
Ticket sales were stable because businesses and brokers were buying a lot, but that wasn’t translating into attendance.
Young fans have gravitated towards soccer, basketball, football, and other sports.
This is a lot. And, I’m only scratching the surface.
The first step to long-term stability, getting the diagnosis right and cutting to the core challenge.
Is it real attendance?
Revenue?
Young fans?
What is it?
Get the diagnosis right first.
Second, strategy before tactics.
One thing I’m concerned about when I see folks rush into NFTs and crypto and all of these other truly cool new technologies is that it has the mark of a “magic bullet”. Meaning, “I’m going to wave this and all my troubles are going to be gone.”
I’m tactically neutral.
I’m not in that class of folks that say, “Cold calls are dead”!
I’m also not in that group of folks that say, “The season ticket needs to be ended”!
In truth, I’m in the group of people that will tell you that the answer is “it depends”. Meaning context is key.
In the case of MLB or any organization, you have to do strategy before tactics.
Again, going back to the coursework I’ve done at Cambridge during the pandemic. We’ve been covering emergent strategy which boils down to being flexible and adaptive to the environment around you.
The key building block is still planning.
In other words, put strategy first. Plan so that you know where you are going.
Finally, you really have to be flexible now.
I talked about emergent strategy and it highlights the need to be flexible now more than ever.
One bright spot to me in the rollout of baseball this season has been that seats have been released in batches, not 81 games at once.
Why?
Because this gives every team a chance to have a reset, to adjust, and to take a new, focused set of actions.
In the case of baseball, once a month or so, you have the chance to look at your prices, your promotion, your distribution, and make considered decisions about which way to go.
Hopefully, this will lessen the likelihood of discounting and other price promotions that undermine the brand value of a team. Also, it should help with the consistency of messaging because of the need to communicate new information more frequently.
One example I’ve seen that I think shows how to do this well is with the way that the Orioles sold their mid-week series with the Tampa Bay Rays. Seats in certain sections were $16 for that specific series and were rooted in honoring Brooks Robinson.
This achieved three things:
They repriced specific sections for a specific series likely reflecting the value of the tickets for that series.
It wasn’t a discount.
Tied back to the history of the team, working it in as an honor, making it seem limited and constrained.
On the other hand, I’ve seen teams heavily discount tickets to the Yankees and the Red Sox which in most instances should be two of your better draws. If that’s the case now, you might want to look at how you are driving demand.
Because price promotions are not great ways to create demand.
Let’s sum this up.
First, diagnosis is key.
What is the core problem? The root challenge to be solved?
Diagnosis is super important.
Second, strategy before tactics.
If you don’t know where you are going, any path will get you there.
Finally, know that nothing you do now is set in stone. So give yourself the freedom to experiment.
I still love baseball. I could go every day if nothing else was in the way.
But I’m not the person that baseball needs to win over.
Baseball, hell a lot of businesses, need to focus on their non-customers to grow their business.
To win those people over, some focus on solving the right problem, creating a strategy, and being flexible enough to figure out what works and what doesn’t.
4. The Future of Theatre Conference is on and they raise some good questions:
Big Ideas:
What comes next is likely to look a lot different than what we had before the pandemic?
If you just think things are going to magically return to “normal”, I’d like to take your money…I mean, bet you.
The key question is “how”? How will we all reinvent ourselves now?
Did I ever tell you about the first show I ever saw on Broadway?
Cat on a Hot Tin Roof with Ashley Judd.
Awful production, but I was captivated by the experience.
This conference put on by The Stage is a great opportunity to revisit some of the key topics that will help folks recover and reignite their venues and their organizations heading out of the pandemic.
For me, looking at the future of theatre and live entertainment boils down to using the old-school writing lesson of the 5 Ws and the H!
Who are we going to make theatre and arts accessible to now?
Not just to see, but to work in.
What will arts and entertainment look like now?
Are these new ways of sharing the arts going to stick around? Concerts? Sports?
When will the arts, sports, and entertainment get back to some semblance of stability?
Really, what will that look like since the business models of so many organizations and businesses have been shown to be very unsustainable after the disruption of the pandemic?
Where will the arts and entertainment take us?
My opinion is that the arts is a great teacher and we need to be challenged. But sports has been playing that role as well and should continue to. How will they get us to a point where we have a better understanding of our community and our world?
I’m not advocating brand purpose either….because unless you are Patagonia, a lot of that is BS.
Why will people return?
If you are betting everything on people coming back because they’ve always done things this way…I’d offer you some retraining services at your local community college or trade office.
Because that is a bad bet.
The reality of the situation is that people’s habits and actions were changing before the pandemic and to expect people to go back to doing things that magically work best for us now is unwise.
How will we recover and reinvent?
To me, this is the most important question and the thing I think about the most, or the second most.
How will the next evolution of the industry come to happen and what it will look like.
I’m curious about your thoughts here.
And, check out what the folks at The Stage are doing.
I dig it!
5. Live Nation sees a huge concert pipeline:
I just got an email from Wilco that had the subject line: “Touring is Back!”
Guess what?!
I’m in!
Wilco, August 20th at Merriweather Post Pavillon will see Mr. Dave jamming to some mid-tempo rock!
This is great!
Love Wilco!
Can’t wait to get to a Pearl Jam concert! (Asbury Park, here I come!) (Unless someone wants to help me get a ticket to Sunday night in Dana Point?!)
Already been to two baseball games!
As the kids say, “Let’s Go!”
The good news is that shows are coming back. The flipside of that is that a lot of shows are coming back along with theatre, opera, sports, and other forms of entertainment.
Plus, you’ll be able to go to the bar with your mates!
So much choice.
This is the problem.
With so much supply, what’s going to happen with demand.
I get to visit the internet chat rooms of the secondary market. One crazy thing to me is that most of the brokers in these chat rooms talk about demand like it is this mystical thing that just happens and I bring this up only because that’s what this whole setup feels like now, throw everything out there and demand is coming like magic
I’m going to mention some shows that I sold some not insignificant amount of tickets to that aren’t on anyone’s list of all-time great Broadway shows as an example of what demand generation means to me.
Tell me if you can honestly remember any of these:
Lennon
The Frogs
Taboo
None of these even count as the worst show I’ve ever seen either.
I bring this up because in today’s world, these tickets wouldn’t move even the amounts that we were able to sell back in the days because everyone seems determined to let demand create itself.
If a secondary platform doesn’t have the keyword for it. If someone doesn’t buy through an ad they see on Facebook. Or, it isn’t on the board at TKTS…does it even exist?
In a lot of places, no.
No it doesn’t because most people forgot or don’t know what demand generation looks like.
Bless Zoe Scaman’s heart! Because she said the quiet part out loud on my podcast when she said, “I told my client, you got to get rid of all of them. They don’t get it.” In regards to the process of marketing.
That’s the danger we are facing right now.
Huge supply of shows! People will only have a limited amount of time or money to go to shows!
Someone is going to get lost in the shuffle! It is really math at this point.
So…how are you going to win the battle in the ultra-competitive marketplace?
As I pointed out in number 3, we are already seeing teams discount.
As we have seen in a bunch of places, demand is changing because businesses can’t buy and that’s shifting demand and buying patterns.
This is with limited capacity in most places.
What happens now?
You know what I’m going to tell you and I’m going to tell you again:
Do some research.
When I chatted with Alex Chang from the 49ers, a question I wish I had asked to illustrate this point was how much had any shifts in population impacted the way the team was communicating with their market.
Why Alex?
Because the news reports big shifts of people from the Bay Area to Austin and Miami. And, I’m curious if that migration is overstated or not.
But, whatever, everyone should be doing research.
Go through the process of STP.
I did a mega-session on STP for the National Sports Forum and I’m willing to do a few free sixty minute sessions for any organizations, teams, etc that want to understand the process a little better because I’m putting together a workshop on marketing strategy to deliver in person once we can do those things again. (Also, don’t miss me next Thursday slinging facts on pricing.)
Segment based on behavior. This is the map.
Target based on the size of the opportunity. This is the destination.
Position against your competition or about yourself. This is the path you will take.
Create yourself a new strategy.
Put that thing in motion!
The marketing mix.
The 4 Ps: product, price, place, promotion.
It is simple. I can’t say it any more frequently and persistently, but the key to your success or failure coming out of the pandemic is entirely reliant on your willingness and ability to get your marketing right.
There is just going to be too much competition to leave this stuff to chance.
I try not to be too hair on fire here, but not getting this right could set your team or organization back for years. And, that’s not a risk you should take.
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La la la! I’m still in DC!
But I’m breaking free soon!
Boston June 24-25.
Miami June 28-July 16
Orlando July 17-18
NYC!
I’ve been trying to get y’all to buy into the research a lot lately. So don’t miss out on the worksheet I created in partnership with Eventellect. It is free and we walk you through the process of creating and understanding your own market research using Net Promoter Score as a starting point.
Email me and I’ll send it over.
Make sure you don’t miss the Group Think festival on 3 June. It is a really great collection of strategists from marketing and advertising agencies around the world. The great thing is the collective efforts of the organizers means that the purchase price goes back into helping expand learning even further. So feed the learning beast.
Check out my friends at Booking Protect! Refund protection uptake has doubled since tickets are going on-sale again. This indicates that people want peace of mind and security in their tickets purchases. Don’t miss out on sales because people don’t feel comfortable buying, help make it easier to purchase by offering refund protection.
Activate is the new tool from Activity Stream. Activate will help you turn your organization into a better marketing organization. I’ve told you how important being a good marketer is going to be in the new times…don’t miss out, check out the new tool, Activate!
Check out my site and my podcast!