Talking Tickets 17 June 2022: The Nets Revenue! Theatre and Inclusion! MLS and Apple! And, More...
#140
Hey There!
Come work with me in NYC on 12 September. The Whiteboard Workshop will be put together with a mixed group.
In this one-day workshop we will end with actions/accountability/ambition.
More importantly, we will work through the Dave Wakeman Whiteboard Framework:
Direction
Choice
Goals
Actions
In the past, we’ve helped folks grow their profits 6 figures in 90 days. I’ve had people improve their profit margin by 1% in under 45 days. And, we’ve given people the knowledge to launch new products, new marketing plans, or new strategies.
As the market opens up, you need to make sure you stand out!
Come to the workshop in NYC. $300. Email me and I will sign you up!
To the Tickets!
1. The Big Story: Joe Tsai’s plans for the Nets and BSE Global:
Big Ideas:
Strategy before tactics.
More targeted in sales approach: that’s really marketing 101.
It is not what you make, but what you keep.
This story caught my eye and I wanted to think through it a little bit.
There’s two dirty secrets here:
When I write the newsletter or blogs or articles, it is a way for me to figure out what I think about a topic.
When I am writing, my imaginary reader is someone that is trying to get into the business of tickets without having any experience in the industry.
I thought you might find that useful because sometimes people might misinterpret what I’ve written or you might be curious how I pick out stories.
So back to the Nets and BSE Global.
Three CEOs since 2019 is a lot. I can’t speak to why this is happening, but I’m sure it is creating an unsettling environment on the business side for the employees of these properties.
What does it tell us that we can apply in our work though?
One challenge you see when there is a lot of turnover is that the new management team hits the ground running too quickly. This is a common occurrence when you are in a senior position.
Hell, it happens to me pretty regularly. I get called in on a project and right away folks want answers and action. The truth of the matter is that every time I go into a new project, I have to learn about the organization in question because each situation is unique in its own way.
So, if I jump to action right away, I’m a failure to my partners.
The same can happen with a new management team or CEO.
This makes the need to put strategy before tactics at the heart of any takeover or change in leadership.
Why am I so adamant about this?
I’ll give you three reasons today:
Diagnosis is key to success or failure of your tenure or project. You have to solve the right challenge, not just the urgent one.
The way to get the right diagnosis and the right answers is time. You mostly likely need a minimum of 90 days to get your footing. When I’m doing research, I’ve tried to accelerate the process, but my research is crap until I hit about 100-120 days of talking with people, reading research, digging, and finding stuff.
If you don’t know where you are going, any road will take you there.
As you’ll learn at my workshop in NYC on September 12th, strategy is about direction, choice, goals, and action. Over and over.
Organizations that struggle will do something that looks like goals, action, and, maybe, choice.
Direction is often tossed aside.
Which makes the other two points especially pertinent.
First, the idea of being more targeted in your sales.
That’s really just marketing 101.
Remember from previous posts that I talk about STP: segmentation, targeting, and positioning.
Segment is drawing the map.
Targeting is picking where you are going to go.
It is one of your biggest moments of strategy. Understanding where you will compete in the market.
So focusing your sales efforts is essential to success, especially today.
I’ve been doing some work on STP with a few businesses around the world lately and I’ve found that a lot of opportunities are sitting out in the open, never getting attention because the map hasn’t been redrawn in a few years or folks haven’t looked at the map to see where the opportunities are.
Finally, we have the idea of growing the revenues to $500M over the next few years.
Do I know if that is a realistic number or not?
No clue.
I’d need to see their revenue and we’d have to look at their strategy to really know the answer.
What I do know is that when you see an arbitrary revenue number thrown out, that’s usually a bad sign for strategy because it means that there is too much focus on the top line.
Why is focusing on the top line a sign of trouble?
Mainly because it isn't what you make, but what you keep that matters the most. Meaning, top-line revenue is great, but what I really want to know is whether you are making money or not.
What’s your margin?
Action items:
Strategy before tactics. You have to know where you are going, where the focus is, and why folks are going to pick you…to get started.
Focus on profits, not revenues. You can have $500M in revenue and still lose money. Most of us can’t afford to throw good money after bad. So look at the profit.
Do the proper work of marketing to pick the best target for your business. That’s marketing 101, but without it, you are going to be in trouble.
2. The Road to Recovery: Are shows too expensive or too woke?
Big Ideas:
Art is meant to teach us how to deal with complicated topics.
Inflation is a challenge in a lot of places.
Think about your positioning.
Just so y’all wouldn’t think I forgot about London or the theatre, I found this article about woke vs. broke and it got me thinking.
I’m not shy about looking at the nature of our politics and seeing that most of the political arguments are great ways to avoid the root causes of challenges or the long-term issues that plague us.
That’s one of the great things that art does for us, it helps explain the world we live in.
Think about things like:
To Kill a Mockingbird and how it explained racism and prejudice.
Or, how “Born in the USA” was an anti-war song?
Art is a way for us to explain the world or make sense of the world around us. So the woke idea may be real, but that is also the point of a lot of art.
The two more important points is the idea that people think that theatre is only for the wealthy.
That’s a positioning problem.
One that would require research, segmentation, and targeting.
Your position is how you show up in the market and the idea or words you want to have associated with your brand.
In this case, if the theatre wants inclusive to be one of the brand associations, there will need to be some serious work done to ensure that this is an idea that is consistently delivered upon through pricing, messaging, and casting…among other things.
This brings us to the final point and, maybe, the biggest issue right now: pricing and inflation.
I did a quick look at inflation numbers for a presentation and found that in the US, inflation is above 8%. In the UK, the number is just over 7.5%. This is causing people to rethink their purchases. In other markets, inflation is an issue as well.
For all of us, that means it is something we have to recognize and adjust our strategies to cope with.
In action:
Have you positioned the way you want to be in the market? This means, are you showing up the way you want to?
Are you reaching the audiences you want to reach? Maybe your message isn’t getting through because you aren’t talking in the right way to the right folks.
Look at inflation and pricing, are you core customers or your targeted customers able to afford your shows and offerings right now?
3. How To: Raise prices or not:
Big Ideas:
Your sector in the market matters.
Your brand will impact your ability to raise or lower prices.
Any sale is an emotional sale.
This week the Wall Street Journal had a good management section in the back of Monday’s paper with a few articles on pricing.
You’ll see this one is built on a bunch of research from companies in many sectors and it provides some lessons for all of us that I’ll run through pretty quickly.
First, context matters in pricing.
In this study, we are looking at segments of the market…obviously. But we are also looking at the day of the week, the opponent, the record, the venue, and much more.
One point I want to make here is that you want to make sure you control the messaging and the marketing around your events so that you aren’t just pricing at the whims of the market.
Second, branding matters.
A strong brand does all kinds of positive things for you like:
Building demand.
There is price integrity that comes with a strong brand.
Creates a preference in the market.
This matters when you are pricing because all of these factors all you to control the pricing power you have.
Price integrity in this context means that you can set a price and you can get it. You don’t have to mess with price promotions, bundles, or other tools that you might institute to achieve sales…whether or not that works, who knows.
Okay, we all know discounts destroy your brand.
Finally, all sales are emotional sales.
We hear folks talk about how they are rational when they make buying decisions. Spoiler: these folks are typically the most emotional when they make a decision because they are trying so hard to not be emotional that it causes them to be overly emotional.
Why does this matter?
Because emotion can impact your price.
Here’s a story that I share pretty regularly. It goes back to when I started in nightclubs and we were working to raise our check average a quarter.
We worked on upselling and I found out the question that would change my career: “What kind of gin do you prefer?”
Why was this question so important?
No one wants to think of themselves as a well gin and tonic drinker. We all have a preference.
This preference adds value and that value can create a price premium. In the example above, we are talking about $1-$2 per drink.
It goes to the point of perception in pricing. What does your product or service do for a person? How does it make them feel? What does the product or service say about the buyer?
In my experience, no one wants to say they hired the cheapest consultant. I’ve yet to meet someone that didn’t have a preference for the kind of gin they drank in the gin and tonic. And, I’ve definitely met tons of people that love Happy Hour.
All of these are stories that people tell themselves and those stories drive what price you can get for your product or service.
4. Tech/Tools/Profiles: Footballers continue to promote NFTs and NFTs continue to crash in value:
Big Ideas:
My poor crypto wallet is bleeding.
Influencer marketing works, but at what cost?
NFTs have started to recede from the spotlight.
What goes up, must come down…am I right?
My crypto wallet would say so, at least.
The damn thing is bleeding red like no one’s business.
So it goes. You buy the ticket, you take the ride.
Two interesting points here about technology and influencer marketing.
First off, we’ve started to hear less hype around the NFTs and crypto space lately. It was going to save the world, now it is going to just creep off to the side for a few minutes and catch its breath.
I don’t say that to dog the folks that are working on crypto and NFT projects, but I do say it to point out that most things aren’t usually all one way or the other…there is usually a lot of middle area that you need to look into.
That’s where we find ourselves now with NFTs and crypto.
Is it as good as it was a year ago?
Probably not.
Is it as bad as it is right now?
I hope not, I’ve got to at least get my nut back from this damn crypto investment!
Finally, this points to the power of influencer marketing. It works. As you can see from the NFTs.
The downside is that there can be a real hit to your brand when you deal with a crypto crash like now or when folks start questioning the utility of what you are selling like we’ve heard with Socios.
What to do?
Take the middle ground: with any new tech, tool, or idea. You want to operate with a certain amount of risk management.
Don’t put all your investment money in one basket. I joke about my crypto wallet, but it is a small amount of money…so it is easy for me to joke about it. Other folks haven’t been so lucky.
Pay attention to your brand equity when you make a partnership. Just like with the crypto and NFTs now, you can have a negative brand impact if you aren’t careful.
5. Blurbs and Such:
The Celtics team up with Vistaprint to help small businesses in New England: I’d need to see the marketing plan for Vistaprint to know for sure how effective this program is, but from a brand awareness aspect this seems to work for me. Vistaprint makes a lot of business cards for a lot of small businesses and freelancers, so this fits.
The battle for control of the Orioles goes to the courts: Camden Yards is still a great place to go see a game. Also, there is a great brewery that is walking distance from the ballpark. But like most family dramas this one comes down to money. What will happen? I’m guessing that ultimately the Orioles will be sold once Peter Angelos passes away.
Have I ever written about golf? Well, today I am: This is a story to covers three topics: green washing an authoritarian regime, protecting your distinctive brand assets, and the free market. Do I even know if there is a huge market for golf any longer? No. What I will tell you is that I caddied one time at the Honda Classic during the pro-am when I was in high school and the amateur who was CEO of a big company tried to stiff me. That’s when I figured I’d had enough of golf.
Good thread on NBA ratings and what they really mean in the context of the last few years: Nothing. The truth is that the ratings over the last few years don’t really tell us much.
MMA for kids is growing: I’m pretty sure that this isn’t a good sign for society.
Churn is driving Apple to MLS: I’m probably going to cover this a little more next week or on the blog, but this is interesting because it will go a long way to improving the brand awareness for MLS.
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Thanks again to the Ticketing Professionals Team. They’ve put together a great event and just announced the new event for 2023. See y’all in Birmingham!
I did the FREE webinar a few weeks back but had some technical issues with the live stream on Microsoft Teams. I’m not sure if was Teams or my new desktop computer, either way…I’m going to continue to play with the tech stack and I posted the audio file in the podcast stream. So, pricing ideas to your heart’s desire.
Lots of great podcast conversations: check out recent conversations with Amanda Lester, Paul Williamson, and, Brett Goldberg.
Let me know who you’d like to hear from by sharing your ideas with me here.