Talking Tickets 19 November 2021: Scan Rates are Down! Germans think they'll just roll out 30% price increases! NFTs are great, unless they aren't! And, More!
Number 111
Hey There!
If you are in America, I hope you have a Happy Thanksgiving this week.
Let me know what you think of the new format of the newsletter. You can just hit reply and get me straight away!
From the open rates, click rates, and feedback, I get the impression y’all dig the newsletter…so why not share it?
I’m looking at doing some podcasting from Orlando and INTIX in January. Let me know if you or someone you know would want to be a guest. We can find some comfy chairs and rock out on ticket talk.
To the tickets!
1. The Big Story:
Attendance is down across sports:
Big Ideas:
This isn’t a simple “COVID” or “demand” issue. It is an issue of strategy.
The first step in any solution is a step backward to define the solution correctly.
What do George Orwell, Baghdad Bob, and reported attendance numbers have in common?
This hit my inbox late last week and as I’ve gotten more adept at planning the newsletter out, I’ve been more focused on slotting things in.
But don’t worry, I have thoughts about the attendance challenges that folks are dealing with.
This was a challenge before the pandemic, there were trends accelerating that pointed towards this situation coming, but the pandemic accelerated everything.
A simpler point: fans were already signaling that they weren’t seeing the value of the live experience as it was presented to them and were holding out for “hot” events or special occasions a lot more than you’d hear from the PR folks hired to flog huge revenue numbers, attendance numbers, or other stories.
The challenge this raised is that these 90% numbers were laughable especially when you had Twitter accounts, Facebook posts, and other forms of media highlighting poor attendance.
It reminds me of the Iraq invasion in 2002 and Saddam’s press secretary who came to be known as Baghdad Bob for his spinning of obvious lies into delusional reality:
I believe the term we would use to describe this kind of double talk and don’t believe your lying eyes is Orwellian.
No one believes these numbers and the truth is that so many of the tickets distributed are still just brokers scooping up deals and partnerships where they can because for so long the model was the person that controlled the inventory won.
This leads to solutions and the first solution begins with you having to be honest with yourself.
We are all going to try and put a positive spin on a bad sales day or a slow run of attendance, but when it has been going on for years, it becomes less PR and more delusion.
That’s a problem because unless you are honest with yourself, you can’t solve the problem.
The solution to this problem points right to Brand Management 101, allow me to explain.
First, you diagnose the situation:
Your first step in any challenge is a step back to see exactly what you are dealing with. This should be true in brand management, marketing strategy, pricing, corporate strategy, sales, and any other decision.
How many billions of dollars does Facebook make a year when the numbers show they aren’t moving tickets like they used to because people fall into the trap of “everyone says you have to be on Facebook?”
So diagnose the situation.
You do that with research.
I won’t give you all the research you can do, but I’ll give you the ones I lean on and try to always do:
Ethnography: Look at what people are doing with a product or service.
One-to-One conversations: Simple, easy, and effective.
Secondary Data: A good Google search, trip to the library, reading some studies…you’ll find some stuff.
Historical Data: I love to know the foundations of a brand, team, or company. The essence of the beginning should be there forever. Look at the brands that you use most and you have the strongest potential connection with like Apple, Starbucks, Vuveue Cliquot, and Ford.
Loyalist Research: If and when I can talk with the people that buy over and over again, I do. They give me the blueprint for long-term brand revitalization.
Brand Tracking: I need to know where the brand is in the market and where it ends up after we get done with our work.
There are tons of other options, but you don’t have to be perfect here because most of your research isn’t static and research is something you should be doing constantly.
You do the research, connect the dots, and discover what the real challenge is.
In the case of poor attendance and ticket sales, from my research and work over the last year, I’ve identified these things as the top 3:
COVID is still a challenge.
Many consumers have changed their habits or don’t find the same value in sports, concerts, and theatre any longer.
Costs. People have shifted what they are willing to spend their money on now.
Your mileage may vary here because each organization is going to see a different market. The challenge is to do your research.
Second, do some strategy.
As straightforward as I can make this:
A proper segmentation using the meaningful/actionable grid. Segment based on behavior and not BS.
Target: follow the numbers and pick the best opportunities for your organization. Targeting is the essence of strategy because it is about choosing where you will focus and what you will ignore.
Position: about you or against your competition. Don’t try to stand in the middle. My favorite point of position is to pick an enemy someone that has bad ideas or is offering up bogus arguments like when I rant against discounts, that’s an easy target and one that “The Denizens of Discounts” don’t have data to back up.
Objectives: SMART so you can be specific about what success will look like.
A personalized funnel: None of this text book AIDA crap. Your research will often tell you exactly what the stages in the sales process look like for your business.
Third, tactical implementation.
How do you know someone is a shit marketer?
(Seriously, this is 100% accurate in every situation.)
They are trying to sell you some new spin on the 4 Ps: product, price, place, promotion.
You hear someone roll out that stuff, run. If they work you, send them to training. If the training doesn’t stick, suggest they find a new job because they are wasting your marketing dollars.
Product: At the bottom, I share a link to an article about the three stages of your product. Read that. Product is more than just the actual item.
Place: This is your distribution strategy. How you get your product to the market. Sales sit here and in the area of promotion.
Promotion: Advertising. Communications. All the stuff about “getting your message out”. In too many organizations, this is what dominates the marketing conversation. In reality, this stuff is about 10% of the overall marketing job.
Price: Price is about perception and it binds the entire marketing effort together. The price-setting moment is marketing’s MVP moment. It is also dangerous because you can throw away all your profit, destroy your brand, and set yourself back fairly easily.
Finally, you repeat this situation constantly.
The cycle of brand management and marketing never ends. You have to always be gaining insights on your customers, adjusting, and adding new value. Over and over and over.
2. The Road to Recovery:
15-30% ticket price increases in Germany are going to become standard because of the pandemic?!
Big Ideas:
The customer decides on the value, not you.
Pricing is marketing’s MVP moment.
Pricing demands research.
Yes.
Prices will go up and the customers will like it!
Sounds like a recipe for disaster to me.
Price setting is going to be a key indicator of whether or not we see a robust recovery in the live entertainment business.
There are a number of paths this could go down like:
People set their prices high and keep trying to raise them at rates higher than inflation like before the pandemic.
People set their prices high and when demand isn’t there, discount like crazy.
People set their prices too high and crater demand across cities.
People do research and focus on the customer so that they can offer customers value that they want and need now.
I had an interesting conversation this week with one of my favorite newsletter readers that has worked with some of the really great brands in sports in Europe. His advice to me was that you always have to talk to the customer. The customer will tell you what they want, need, and will pay.
The kicker was that this is my advice to everyone anyway.
So we laughed!
That’s especially true here.
I keep harping on the need to get into the market to understand the customer, but it is really the most important thing you can do right now.
You need to do the research to understand what customers are feeling, wanting, and willing to spend money on right now.
I can offer you a 100% money-back guarantee on this free advice: your customers have changed during the pandemic. They may not know it and realize it, but they have. We all have.
To expect that folks will act the same now, that’s a losing bet.
Get out into the market, do your research because good research leads to good pricing decisions.
Here’s a three-step formula:
Put together a simple survey in survey monkey or something similar that is built around some variation of the question: Are you going out to see live entertainment and/or what does that look like for you? Include some questions around wants, needs, preferences, and willingness to pay. (Use something like the Van Westdorp survey…not something like does $100 seem like a good price?)
Get a representative sample of your market if at all possible. We are talking about 300-400 people in most markets.
Push out the survey and analyze the data.
Your survey can be pretty simple like 10 questions or less.
You should be able to see where people think prices are too high and make them not want something, or so low that it makes them question the quality.
You should have a better understanding of what is driving behaviors now.
Start with the smallest viable survey and move from there.
3. How-To/Q&A:
The Washington Football Team shows us the importance of Market Orientation:
Big Ideas:
Jason Wright took responsibility for a mistake. That’s a step in a positive direction.
Market Orientation helps remove the guesswork from these kinds of situations.
Striving to create a better environment or better practices isn’t a straight line up. And, when we see a leader accept responsibility, highlight where the mistakes were made, and follow up on steps for improvement…that’s something to appreciate.
This story doesn’t need a lot of analysis except it happened in my neighborhood and it allows me to highlight a couple of ideas that are important for everyone to keep in mind.
First, Jason Wright came right out and admitted a mistake.
We don’t see that very often or we haven’t seen that very often over the last few years.
So straight away we should acknowledge that and tip our hats to Jason’s candid response.
This doesn’t read like some hogwash PR statement. It reads like Jason made the mistake and is owning up to it.
More of this, please.
Second, the reason a mistake like this happens is something common in a lot of places. The idea that “we know exactly what our customers will want.”
This is the opposite of market orientation.
You see it when someone say, “we just can put ourselves in the shoes of the customer.”
You can’t. Thinking you can is dangerous and often leads to bad decisions.
The opposite is Market Orientation. And, that is just the idea of saying, “We don’t know what the customer wants, but we can definitely find out.”
That’s all this chatter about research is, a call for focusing on the customer.
WFT made a common mistake and it seems like they are learning the right lessons from their mistake.
Finally, Jason Wright has come into the team at a time of change, transition, and reckoning from bad behavior.
His job isn’t easy.
It won’t be easy for a long time, if ever.
But, he continues to make progress.
Our big takeaway here is that progress can be slow, messy, and not in a straight line.
Look at the trendline, that’s all we can do. We all make mistakes.
Own them. Fix them. Try and do better.
4. Profile/Tech/Tools:
The Warrington Wolves are the first Super League team to launch their kits as an NFT:
Big Ideas:
I’ve bought some shares of the crypto that drives the Socios.com platform.
Karl Fitzpatrick talks about “progressive and innovative” as brand values.
Creative application of new technology is a great opportunity to grow and expand your market.
This is cool stuff from the Wolves!
I’m going to go out here from the start and say that adding a NFT or crypto options to your marketing and sales efforts isn’t for everyone.
You have to make sure it fits into your strategy and that it works for your organization. If it does, you should work to introduce and include new technologies.
I’ve been following the NFT and crypto scene for a year or two now and I’m excited by the possibilities and the opportunities that using this new technology can create for folks.
At the same time, I’m aware that a lot of people have fallen into the commodity trap and are using NFTs or some other tactic as a Hail Mary to solve a strategic problem that they’ve failed to address.
So…pay attention to this stuff, but make sure it fits into your strategy.
You want to listen to someone that recognizes tech is great, but having your strategy first is so important: check out my conversation with Karl on the podcast.
This all ties together with Karl’s quote about the “progressive and innovative” nature of the team’s Brand DNA.
As long as I’ve known Karl, this has been at the heart of his mission with the team: make them forward-looking, progressive, innovative, and creative.
Knowing this is at the heart of Karl’s vision makes the impact of the NFT launch have a greater likelihood of success.
This is a real brand vision in action.
What lessons do we need to know here:
Strategy first. Don’t just throw spaghetti against the wall, know where you are heading.
Make sure any new tactics you use, help advance your goals.
Be certain that you have a vision for your business. The Warrington Wolves are focused on progress and innovation among other things. Dave is focused on effectiveness, profitability, and cutting out the BS that surrounds most businesses. What are yours?
5. Links and Blurbs:
Not ticket-related, but important: I learned about this from Mark Ritson and I’ve been using it ever since. People ask me how I get so much done or how I can take the same information that everyone else has and apply it in a new way, here is your answer right here.
Fans are still reluctant to return: Surveys have been remarkably consistent here…as long as the pandemic feels a bit out of control, people are going to continue to hold off on going to shows. This highlights that the customer’s perception is the most important thing and that folks need to be focused on communicating safety, security, and welcome back.
Real Madrid uses NFTs to deepen their fan connection: I bought some of the NFTs that power Socios.com last week, around 100 shares. So not a huge thing, but I find this area interesting because it is more tangible than some of the other stuff. Of course, value is in the eye of the customer and people derive value from tangible and intangible value.
Let’s jump out of the gate with discounts: I hate seeing the Christmas show discounted so heavily right out of the jump. Because it doesn’t really have to be that way. “The Denizens of Discounting” will tell you something of the nature that “the market will decide,” “let’s get them in the door and win them over, they’ll definitely come back”, or something else that has no real basis in data or experience.
Attendance isn’t as simple as needing better sales leaders: I wrote this based off of some thinking I had from a tweet by Patrick Ryan. The reality of the recovery of live events is that a rethinking of the value proposition, the in-game experience, and the entire ecosystem needs to occur or we are going to see challenges continue. So I explain the three levels of product thinking to help stimulate new ideas.
You can find me everywhere with my special Linktree! It is all my links!
Great podcast with Pauline Fallowell from the London Theatre Company! We talk about data, market focus, and audience building. Totally worth your time.
Check out my friends at Booking Protect! Customers have been taking up refund protection at a rate that is double what it was before the pandemic began. This is a great opportunity for you to offer more value to your customers in a way that they want while also creating a new revenue stream for your organization.