Talking Tickets 16 April 2021: Baseball's Brands! Nebraska's Marketing Decision! Pricing at The Masters! And, More!
Episode 80
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I’ve been sitting with this podcast all week with Jim Collins. I talk about how Simon Mabb introduced me to ‘The Stockdale Paradox’ last summer and how keeping my focus on the idea that this would suck but we would get through it has helped me through the pandemic.
In the before times, I would do one-day workshops called ‘The Whiteboard Workshop’ and I’d spend about 6-8 hours over a day or two with a business asking a series of questions to help people focus, create actions to move forward, and get refocused. Jim’s question about the 5 most brutal facts really hit me.
I’d suggest you give it a listen and if you are brave enough sit down and wrestle with your 5 most brutal facts right now.
Happy Hour tonight with the gang!
Check out our Slack Channel!
I’m going to test out a new one by hosting “Office Hours”. Book a free 20-minute session with me!
To the Tickets!
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1. The University of Nebraska is going its own way on marketing and revenue deals:
Big Ideas:
Nebraska needs to do the work of proper marketing to ensure success.
A key to the success of this program will be building a new sales process that reflects their situation.
To be successful in any new product launch, context matters. So do the research, build a strategy, and let the 4 Ps deliver on that value.
Back in 2012, I worked on a presidential campaign and one of the owners of the firm I was working in was a Nebraska guy. He would get very angry when I would mention that Alabama was the greatest program in college football history.
I bring that up because “Roll Tide!” and this is an interesting story to look at.
Let’s begin by acknowledging that walking away from $13M is no easy feat.
But as Professor Nels Popp says, “schools are often leaving a lot of money on the table”.
I followed the discussion on Nels’ Twitter feed and recognize that there are a number of new paths that Nebraska could take. There is also a strong argument for continuing with the old model.
But what does moving forward in this manner look like?
Let’s look at three things:
It is the University of Nebraska. They do have a well-established brand. So it isn’t like no one is going to take their business if this doesn’t work.
$13M isn’t a huge sum of money in the context of big-time college athletics.
The power of direct connection with your customers. In this case, advertisers, sponsors, and other key stakeholders.
Another one I found as I was doing some research on this, the Nebraska athletic department is in good shape financially…and that helps with this kind of decision as well.
I’d caution that there are two significant challenges that Nebraska will face in ensuring that they are successful here:
Will they try to recreate their current sales model or will they spend the time building a sales team that best reflects the market they are in?
Will they do the proper marketing work to set themselves up for success in launching what amount to a whole new set of products?
Let’s start with the marketing side because in my opinion marketing should be the team leading the sales department and that doesn’t always happen.
Why am I emphasizing marketing first?
Because context is key.
Someone forwarded me a tweet this week that came down to a lot folks don’t like the reality that in most cases the right answer to a marketing question is “it depends.”
I was on the phone with a colleague when I was driving to Roanoke and to prove a point I said, “Ask me anything you want to know about marketing. Anything.”
After a long pause, a question came across.
I answered, “I don’t know. But I do know how to do the research.”
The key to beginning a program like this is that you need to start by recognizing that you don’t know the answer, that this is okay, and that research can help you find the answer.
Knowing this opens the door to Market Orientation. Which is getting the voice of the customer into your organization.That is great because it opens the door to research which is the key to successfully launching any new marketing initiative, product, or service.
Finally, marketing is key here because it also highlights the importance of brand management.
Nebraska’s AD is quoted saying Nebraska is a “Top 5” brand in college sports. I stop counting after #1: Alabama. But wherever they fall in the brand rankings, the reality is that the Nebraska brand is strong and managing that brand is a big part of the job of the athletic department.
Next, the sales model.
Going back to my conversation with Tony Knopp on The Business of Fun, I’ve been telling y’all the business sales process at most of these teams could be improved.
In far too many places, phone crushing is still the name of the game.
Little known fact, I actually did a stint as a door-to-door salesman as a teenager for a summer job.
I bring that up because I’m not some “the cold call is dead” person.
What I am is someone that recognizes that the job of the modern salesperson is really about sales enablement.
What do I mean by sales enablement?
Really, selling to people in the way that they want to buy and getting out of their way so that they can buy easily.
How do you modernize the sales process for a sports organization?
First, you have to get outside of the sports business bubble long enough to see what other businesses are doing and how their sales folks are having success.
Second, focus on outcomes, not activities.
A meeting is an outcome.
A dial is an activity.
If you measure for how many meetings you have, it is going to change the inputs. If your calls are not getting you meetings, you may end up going with a different prospecting pattern, you might focus on insights, or you may revisit your sales funnels.
I don’t know the answer right off the top of my head because the reality is no one does because you have to build your sales processes within the context of your specific team, market, and context.
The key is that you have to focus on outcomes, not activity.
How do we do this?
First, do your research!
It is still a little difficult to get entirely relevant data to act upon, but you can begin gauging your audience using qualitative conversations and quantitative surveys.
Second, dig in and set a solid strategy.
Every product needs its own funnel.
You need to recognize that there aren’t generic funnels and that your research helps you build out customized funnels that reflect your reality.
After that, set some SMART objectives.
The article mentioned that they have some internal valuations.
The valuations and ambitions are great, but SMART objectives are key to knowing where you are and where you need to get to. To me, they are the key to success.
By SMART, I mean:
Specific
Measurable
Ambitious
Realistic
Time-Bound
Finally, use the marketing work you’ve done to drive your sales processes. Not vice versa.
Sales Oriented organizations are susceptible to discounts, too many products, and overstretching due to the mentality that all customers are good customers, all revenue is good revenue, and all I need is more stuff to sell.
Market Oriented organizations do the work of marketing so that they are closer to their market, better know the needs and desires of their targets, and typically launch more profitable services and products.
2. The Masters, the Falcons, and prices:
Big Ideas:
Price is the MVP moment of marketing. It is where you capture some of the value you’ve created.
Getting the price right is important. For every 1% in the price you grow, you capture 10-12% more profit.
I’m like the Yoda of pricing! I’ve been a part of millions of individual pricing decisions now and my questionnaire at the bottom will help guide you to make better decisions like me.
I’m a bit disappointed that the Times didn’t call me about my thoughts on pricing at the Masters since I’m now a go-to pricing resource in sports business and grew up in Northern Georgia from the time I was 18 months old until I was 14.
But, alas, I’ll have to keep waiting for my debut in the paper of record.
This was an interesting piece for a few reasons:
Georgia seems to be a place where the sports business folks are comfortable making pricing decisions that stand out from the norm.
The pricing decisions seem to lead to stronger brand loyalty and folks seem to make more money!
Where do I get a Pimento Cheese t-shirt?!
Kidding aside, price is the MVP moment in marketing. For every 1% of the price you gain, you get 10-12% in profits. The flipside of that is that you have to manage the prices because if no one buys, you make nothing. And, the post-purchase perception is valuable because you need people to feel like they’ve received fair value for what they purchased.
If you are new here, I’ve got a problem with $45 t-shirts and $17 beers, especially when you miss significant time watching the game to buy these things.
I just don’t feel that the combination of below-average service and ultra-premium prices is a business model that will lead to long-term health and success.
I mention this because price is a strategic decision even if pricing is a tactical tool to deliver on your marketing goals.
In the case of the Masters, they seem to have made a strategic decision a long time ago to keep prices of tickets and concessions affordable, this drives the mystique of the tournament. Much like you’ve never been able to see certain holes on TV.
With the Falcons, we’ve seen that having reasonable pricing for food and beverage has helped them make more money.
In my research, the biggest question a lot of folks have right now is how do I get my pricing right. I can’t give you a worksheet or a program that will solve all of your pricing questions in this newsletter, but I can get you started.
Start here:
Pick a part of your product mix that you want to test the pricing on.
Randomly select a sample of your customers/target market.
Ask them a set of 4 simple questions:
At what price is ___ so low you question the quality?
At what price do you think it is a bargain?
At what price does ___ begin to seem expensive?
At what price does ___ begin to seem too expensive?
This isn’t the most scientific price study we can do, but in my experience, it works pretty well.
If you do the pricing questionnaire with your market, email me and I’ll tell you how to plot the data to figure out what it means.
And, what was funny in thinking through this I realized that I’m like the Yoda of pricing because I realized that due to the nature of my work over the years, I’ve seen hundreds of years worth of marketing plans and strategies and helped make millions of individual pricing decisions!
I guess that means, “Do or don’t do! There is no try!”
3. The Yankees are worth more than the Mets and this highlights the power of brand and branding:
Big Ideas:
Brand Management is about perception. You have to know what people think, know what you want to be in the market, and build a plan to achieve it.
Your brand is your most valuable asset. Act accordingly.
The best brands have some sort of brand tracking mechanism in place.
If you’ve never listened to my podcast episode with Corey Leff, the man behind the John Wall Street newsletter, it is worth a listen.
Corey is a good dude and I read his newsletter every morning. So check it out!
So I’ve emailed him to make the same joke…this piece tries really hard to not say the word brand.
Why am I making this point?
Because for most businesses your brand is your most valuable asset.
And, to take the fuzzy, new-age speak off the word brand, your brand is just the accumulation of all the positive and negative interactions your market has had with you over the years.
This matters because a strong brand is worth a lot of money. Keeping your brand strong and protecting it is one of the most important jobs of a good CEO or CMO.
So how do you do this?
First, you need to do some brand tracking!
How do you do brand tracking?
Each team does it a little differently, but you are going to want to measure some of the following:
Awareness
Perception
Price Sensitivity
Brand Loyalty
Next, you are going to want to think through those 2-3 ideas, words, impressions you want to stamp on folks’ brains.
I’ve talked about my journey of putting my business through the process of STP this year and how I wanted to position myself against the other competition in marketing by being focused, effective, and profitable.
How am I doing?
Let me know.
The key is that I took those three words and rebuilt the entire way I do my two newsletters, the podcast, and my media appearances to make sure each one of them supports those ideas.
All of this leads to brand management.
What is brand management but managing the perception of your brand from planning what it should be, analyzing it, and planning and managing the brand to make sure that perception remains exactly where you want it.
Considering all of these factors, when you look at the Yankees, you’ll see a team that has been building their story for a hundred years now with Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig, Derek Jeter, Mickey Mantle, and more.
You have the logo on the caps and the allure of Old Yankee Stadium.
Over time, the Yankees became synonymous with winning, and winning attracted attention and money.
The continued nurturing of that image through the championship teams of the 1990s and into the 2000s gave those stories and the brand continued relevance and the ability to accrue substantial brand equity.
Across town, the Mets have only been around since 1969 and they haven’t always been known for success.
Sure, the 1986 team is one of the all-time teams in baseball, but as Jeff Pearlman notes in his book on the Mets, the team burned out after winning once.
And, when you look at the team through the lens of the last 15 years or so, the team had the shadow of underperforming compared to the market and the potential resources while being owned by an ownership group led by people closely tied to the Bernie Madoff Ponzi Scheme.
This is a long way of saying that brand means everything and that closing the valuation gap between the Yankees and the Mets shouldn’t be a huge lift for the following reasons:
Their new owner, Steve Cohen, is rich, is a fan, and is doing a great job of engaging with the market. It matters. Remember, brand perception.
New York City is a sports town, a baseball town. And, having lived in the city for a decade and self-identifying as a New Yorker, I can tell you that there’s a bit more zip when the Mets are winning. This is an intangible thing, but when the Mets are winning there is a different feeling. Again, perception.
The Mets are positioned to be more financially successful due to the perception that ownership has a plan, will invest in the team, and wants to win. This should translate to ticket sales, sponsorships, and brand equity.
What can we do with this in our own organizations?
First, if you don’t already, you might want to consider doing some sort of brand tracking.
It gives you a good baseline for where you are in the market and can help you see your strengths in a way you may not have seen them before and it can give you a head’s up about any weaknesses.
I often ask folks to show me their brand tracking data. And, a lot of time folks don’t have it.
Second, make sure your brand is reflecting those two or three things you really want folks to remember about you.
I’m going to give you an example here and I purposely didn’t ask them what they wanted people to think of because I wanted to see if the impression I have is accurate.
The Boston Red Sox premium sales department typically does one of the best jobs in sports of marketing on branding their premium spaces.
Look at the Jim Beam Dugout Club, the Green Monster seats, and all of their premium spaces to see how the product is positioned about them or against the competition.
So the big reveal on the words/phrases that come to mind when I think about the Red Sox premium seating areas:
Unique
Personal
First-Class
One thing they do with some of their partners is travel to Spring Training. That was out this year due to the pandemic.
But the question came up internally about how they could give their partners something that would still get them in the spirit of the season and create an experience that their partners would embrace and enjoy.
This package showed up on my doorstep at the start of Spring Training:
What is this but a Spring Training travel package when you can’t actually go to Spring Training?!
The Oculus technology is amazing and there is a really great video with Ichiro taking batting practice that is totally worth it, but the bigger idea is that in my mind the Red Sox went out of their way to make certain that those important ideas remained stamped on people’s brains at a time when the normal rhythms of the season aren’t possible.
From what I gather, the partners love them as they are sending pictures to their membership reps playing with the headset, wearing their sneakers, and showing off their luggage.
I think this is a cultural thing as well because when I talked with the group sales team, the brand image that I am stuck with is:
Fun
Personal
Community Driven
That’s brand management which is the third key here. Make sure you are doing things in a way that will help you live up to the image you want to project to your market.
Update: I shared my analysis with the Red Sox and they said fun, personal, and unique are the three attributes that they highlight more than any others in most of their conversations.
I also asked them to make any jokes about my analysis at my expense that they felt were required. They declined!
Big Ideas:
Re-opening isn’t recovery.
Most of the businesses that will struggle or fail after the pandemic haven’t updated or created a strategy.
The first step in solving any problem is to get diagnosis right.
For so long, we’ve been stuck in a state of uncertainty.
I’m not saying that has gone away, but I am saying that we can see hope everywhere.
The pubs are open in England, fans will be at the Carabao Cup final, Lin Manuel Miranda and Mayor DeBlasio opened up a Broadway vaccination location, Australian venues are having 100% capacity in some instances.
But the point of the above article is that reopening isn’t recovery and that just because the doors are open, it doesn’t mean that everything is back!
I’ve been surveying folks a bit and in a lot of instances, people are in a mad rush to get back to business as usual.
I’m not sure if I am surprised or not surprised by this, but I have had quite a few people tell me that they haven’t really fundamentally changed any of their marketing and sales practices to reflect a different view of the world after the pandemic.
Alarm bells for me!
A question I have been studying is some version of “what will make some businesses succeed and some fail after the pandemic?”
I’ll try and distill my thinking on the topic into 3 quick hits on each side:
Those businesses that succeed are going to:
Dig in deeper to their connection to their customers and their community like the Red Sox have done with their various sales departments, their new uniforms that reflect many Boston traditions, and the way that they’ve used their various platforms to promote public health, social justice, and community through the pandemic.
Recognize their importance as highlights and pillars of their community. You can see this in the way that Broadway is symbolic in many ways of the best of New York City. Or, the way that Melbourne and Sydney’s re-launching of events gave these cities a sense of freshness and rebirth. And, don’t even get me started on the West End!
Take lessons from the pandemic about the importance of the arts, sports, and entertainment and combine those with addressing the new trends brought on by the pandemic to fix some of the issues that they were struggling with before the pandemic. In a matter of weeks, the New York Philharmonic created an entirely digital experience. I talked about the Paris Opera a few weeks back. And, looking at someone like the University of Nebraska above highlights the need to control the experience of your customers as one key to turning around the no-show challenge and lack of attendance in some places.
On the flip side, the businesses that are likely to fail or struggle after the pandemic seem to already be exhibiting three key attributes:
They are already falling back on old tricks. I highlighted the fact that a major venue was already offering discounts on the second day that they were back open. I see a lot of the same bad sales habits coming back already. And, the marketing of a lot of places may even be less effective than before. This all points to a lack of strategy and a lack of strategic focus. That’s going to kill your business if you don’t step back ASAP and fix it.
These businesses haven’t married themselves to the idea that their main goal needs to be demand generation. Last week I shared my conversation with Lisa Walker and we got into a good talk on demand generation. Privately, I’ve talked with executives from a number of different clubs and partners, getting the urgency of demand across to their teams feels like a bigger struggle than it should be. The thing with the arts, sports, or any form of entertainment, all of it is once in a lifetime but that alone can’t guarantee that people are going to come. Build a better mousetrap, sure. But if you don’t toot your own horn there isn’t any music.
They didn’t do a good job of staying in touch with their communities during the pandemic. A few weeks back, I highlighted a venue in Rhode Island that held performances in a parking lot. I brought up Dave Chappelle and his shows in his neighbor’s field. I just pointed out the New York Philharmonic and their digital evolution. I can go on, but the point was that you needed to make sure you were staying in touch with your audience throughout the pandemic and not for some lovey dovey reason either, but because if you aren’t showing up to keep awareness high someone else is filling that space in your customer’s mind. And, out of the pandemic, competition is going to be fierce.
So what do we do with this?
One, focus on your strategy.
Do you know where you will compete and how you will win?
Second, what’s your marketing plan look like?
You do have one, don’t you?
Third, if you are stuck and don’t know where to start: begin by creating a list of the facts you are dealing with, make sure they are facts, and start building yourself a way to deal with these facts constructively.
Typically, in my work, the first step is diagnosis.
Start there. Diagnose the situation you are dealing with.
5. A few things to highlight that didn’t work in any of this week’s analysis:
Home in Manchester launches a Covid safe outdoor venue: It goes without saying, I can’t wait to get back to visit my friends in the UK and I love the place. I also like that people are still finding new ways to welcome back customers and to make their spaces unique and inviting.
Are teams leaving broadcast money on the table or undervaluing their fans: I have some research on my computer from a major organization done by a broadcast partner that shows that piracy is a real issue. What was more interesting was why. Think about the why as you read this. The why feeds into everything that an organization is succeeding with and struggling with.
The Australian National Opera comes to Canberra: I want to go to Canberra as well! Again, there is a theme to innovation and bringing your products to new markets that is really good to see.
A-Rod is buying the Timberwolves, but that doesn’t mean the Sonics are coming back: Just because A-Rod has a connection to Seattle doesn’t mean that if he buys the Timberwolves they are moving to Seattle. Listening to a few podcasts on the topic, the most likely path forward is expansion which if you’ve been following along with me, you knew was the most likely path eventually anyway. Bring ‘em back is all I have to say on the topic!
Bonus:
I didn’t get the chance to share this as a part of a broker story, but Dave Brooks was finally able to uncover the identity of the person behind the Don_Shano Twitter account this week and I hope this brings to a close the spamming and slamming between the two…I’ll share the video because the production value of it made me laugh…and sometimes that helps.
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What am I up to?
I’m in DC! I’ll have achieved immunity or full vaccination on Tuesday so let’s hit pub!
Check out The Business of Fun stream. Mark Herschberg was my guest this week to talk about the skills and tools you’ll need to help get your career back on track or grow in your career.
Have you been paying attention to your Net Promoter Score? I’ve put together a worksheet with Eventellect to explain the idea to you and help you create a survey of your own. This newsletter has an NPS of 67 and that is outstanding, but Eventellect’s is 77. So jealous! Get the free worksheet and find out what your score is and we can help you analyze your results.
Data shows that customers are buying refund protection at a rate of double what they were buying it before the pandemic. This indicates that people are definitely looking for some peace of mind and security as things open up again. Check out my friends at Booking Protect to find out how you can offer your guests refund protection and create a new revenue stream for your business.
Activity Stream launched a new tool this week, Activate. It is a great new tool to help you turn your data into better email marketing campaigns. I’m going to have a chat with Einar for the podcast next week and we will get into all the details, but check out what they are doing. The Activity Stream team has put together a series of webinars to explain the new features and the value that you can create from using this tool.