Talking Tickets 2 April 2021: Selling Tickets! A Pricing Lesson! Inter Milan's New Logo! London! And, More!

Episode 78

Hey There!

Over the last few weeks, I’ve been peppering you with asks to fill out my quarterly-ish survey for the newsletter.

At the end of 2020, I had a Net Promoter Score of 53.

Pretty good!

I was happy, but I’m greedy and I want more!

I’m happy to say that after Q1, the NPS for the newsletter now sits at 67!

The big thing, I eliminated the detractors from the mix!

How?

I listened to your feedback, made some tweaks, and it worked!

One challenge I’m still working to resolve is doing more around ticket sales. The events of the last year have not given me as many chances to write about this topic, but now that fans are back in seats more frequently, I’m sure I’ll get the opportunity.

This goes without saying, I’m a big fan of NPS and using it as a single metric to tell me where my business is.

I run it for workshops and other aspects of my business as well.

In researching how to teach y’all about it, I found a colleague in Patrick Ryan, CEO of Eventellect, that is also a fan of the measure.

So we’ve come together to share some cool examples and lessons about NPS to help y’all understand it better and use it effectively as fans return.

On Thursday, I recorded a new episode of The Business of Fun with Lisa Walker, Eventellect’s SVP of Business Development for College Athletics.

We had a great time. It was Lisa’s first podcast and we hit on the topic of revenue versus profits, market research, and segmentation based behavior!

That episode will come out next week, Tuesday or Wednesday.

In advance of releasing that episode, we also put together a worksheet to teach you about the NPS survey, what it means, and how to use one in your business.

As an added bonus, we are going to offer the first three folks to reach out a free coaching session with me around the survey, results, and how you can use the feedback to add value to your customers or to pinpoint areas that may create challenges for you.

Just send me an email and I’ll get the worksheet over to you!

Happy Hour tonight at 5 PM with Matt and Ken. I’m a soccer dad so I’ll try and call in from the mobile office!

But the boy has a tournament in Maryland! He’s getting very good…like 7 goals in 10 games good including a hat trick!

Check out the Slack Channel! If you need or want to chat, over 250 folks hang out in there and you can always hit me up. I know the pandemic has been a slog but we will get through this thing together! But don’t feel like you have to go through this alone! I’m here for you!

Share the newsletter with a colleague, friend, or co-worker! This helps me a ton!

To the Tickets!

___________________________________________________________

1. Changes are coming to the Champions League:

Key Points:

• Changing a winning formula can have unintended consequences even when it seems like a no-brainer.

• You need Market Orientation and research to really know the market.

• Be careful messing with your brand. Distinctiveness matters.

Let’s get this out of the way, I love the example shown to help describe the new format of the Group Stages of the Champions League because Tottenham is included as a “legacy” club that wouldn’t make it otherwise!

Okay, save the jokes, I want them to just qualify on their own…but beggars can’t be choosers!

But like all decisions, this one comes down to money.

I get it.

On the surface, this seems like so much winning.

But there are a few areas where these changes could create issues.

First, the quality of the product.

Remember when baseball started interleague play?

That stuff was popping, the games got a lot of attention, and the sellouts were fast and furious.

Then, after a year or two, you could stand in the middle of Times Square trying to give away Yankees/Mets tickets and no one would take them.

Trust me, I tried.

The same thing could happen here where the exclusivity of the matchups is removed and the matches gain a feeling of monotony.

Second, this is really about product orientation over market orientation.

Product Orientation is about having a product, feeling marketing is educating the consumer, and thinking that if you just spend enough time teaching your market to care…they will.

Market Orientation is about the customer. Their needs, wants, and desires are key. Ultimately, about getting the voice of the customer into your business.

UEFA has a great product now that ends with the most-watched annual TV production in the world. The number of people that tune into the Champions League final is about 3.5x greater than the Super Bowl.

So any changes the way that the tournament is presented carries some risk.

More of a good thing isn’t always a good thing.

Third, it may undermine the distinctiveness of the Champions League brand.

Organizations spend billions annually building up their brands with distinct assets, connections with an audience or customer base, all in the effort to build price protection, top-of-mind awareness, and moats around their businesses.

You can throw it all away a lot more easily than you might imagine.

Look at this new logo from Inter Milan.

It was part of a new re-brand to make them a fashion icon.

Is it good or bad?

I don’t know.

What I do know is it doesn’t look like Inter Milan. And, that loss of distinctiveness can carry a tremendous cost.

The old Inter Milan logo was about as distinct as you can get. You know the Inter name and the font, it all tells a story and stands out.

For me, in world football, the Inter logo and crest rank right up there with:

• Juventus

• Tottenham

• Manchester United

• Liverpool

• Real Madrid

• Barcelona

You have to be careful messing with your brand codes.

Because all of the brand equity you’ve built over the years can vanish in short order and you might never regain it.

Let’s tie this up to some lessons for action.

First, focus on the customer.

Too much of a good thing isn’t always a good thing. You have to walk a line between giving people what they say they want and offering them the value that they need or express.

Think about it in terms of discounts.

People say they love discounts. The data shows that discounts also destroy your brand faster than anything else you can do.

Do the research. Follow behavior. Design your products around this.

Second, be careful with your brand.

If you are managing a brand, your primary job is to stamp two or three terms or ideas on your market’s mental space.

The best explanation of this is still the first, Positioning by Ries and Trout. Great book! You should check it out!

Your brand is the position and space you hold in people’s heads. It can be positive or negative and adds up or subtracts over time.

The caveat is the negatives carry more weight than the positives, unfortunately. And, they work much more quickly against you than the positives work in your favor.

So anytime you do anything with your brand or your business, you have to weigh the costs to your brand.

Your Brand is the sum of everything. And, the meaning that your brand holds for your customers and market makes your brand what it is.

2. Mark Cuban thinks that NFTs are a potential ticket disrupter:

Key Points:

• My concern here is that with NFTs we have to be careful that they fit into our strategy.

• Strategy before tactics.

• Research, segmentation, and targeting is where you start.

We’ve discussed my crypto portfolio in the past…I’m up 20% for the year so far! #Winning!

I mention this because I don’t want to come off as some sort of Luddite. In truth, I imagine that in most instances, I’m far ahead of my peers in embracing new technologies and approaches.

But my question with NFTs and cryptocurrency as a tool to drive ticket sales and ticket revenue is are we doing a good enough job of mastering the basics before we start jumping into second level tools and ideas?

In a lot of cases, the past few months of NFT mania and crypto-collectibles have felt a lot like trying to get rich off of Pokemon Go!

I haven’t gotten into the basics of post-pandemic ticket selling a lot yet because there hasn’t been a lot for me to really see or point to over the last few months. You know, a pandemic and all.

As we are seeing the States open up, Australia and New Zealand largely back to normal, and many Asian countries throwing big concerts and events, I will be able to return to the topic with data and real examples.

Yippee!

I was chatting with a couple of friends recently from two different teams. We were discussing an interesting topic: who will our customers be after the pandemic?

The implication is that the market for tickets has probably changed due to the pandemic.

The second level of thinking is that even if the same market exists, the value proposition might be different.

On a third level, don’t make assumptions.

My concern is that too many organizations are going to run back, throw open the doors, and pretend like everyone just took a nap.

I don’t think that is a wise decision because in many cases, the underlying processes and businesses may have needed attention before the pandemic.

Prepare for a very controversial statement.

My view is that marketing needs to drive sales, not vice versa.

What do I mean by that?

I mean that the way that I learned marketing and sales, marketing leads the sales department and is a huge part of the marketing mix. Ideally, showing up in the areas of promotion, place, and being able to feedback intelligence on product and price.

This is why I hit on the difference between Market Orientation and Sales Orientation regularly.

As I’ve mentioned before Sales Oriented organizations can get a little too comfortable with discounts. They also seem to say price is the big issue more than Market Oriented businesses. And, I’ve yet to meet a Sales Oriented business that wouldn’t crush their quota with a few more products to sell.

In businesses everywhere, sales operates independently of marketing or drives marketing.

These businesses almost always underperform on profit.

Back to NFTs and the disruption of ticket sales.

My concern with this is that you can let tactics drive everything you do. Put the means before the ends, if you want.

NFTs are potentially great.

They are also maybe not great.

As with everything, context matters.

We really have to see the long-term habits and actions that form over a season or a few seasons before we can safely say that NFTs are changing ticket sales.

It is great to experiment with all kinds of new tools, technologies, and ideas, but never lose sight of the basics and the SMART objectives that your organization should be guided by.

As an aside, an interesting idea is that NFT and cryptocurrency could be a replacement for gambling!? This could mean that some of the attention that folks were giving to sports will shift permanently or was never really about sports to begin with.

Not the craziest idea I’ve ever heard of.

But habits and behavior are why I continue to harp on research.

Right now, sales teams are being thrown together to sell with an emphasis on activity.

But now is a great time to take a step back and do some diagnosis to help set yourself up for success.

The old model of ticket sales wasn’t all that effective in a lot of markets anyway. You only have to look at the number of young sales reps that were churned through annually to see that something about the way that sales was being taught wasn’t working.

How do we reset our sales efforts? These three steps to start.

• Research: We may still be a little ahead of getting any real great information from our research, but we can track consumer sentiment, feelings, and watch the behaviors that we do have the chance to see take place.

• Segment the market: Most segmentation conversation focuses on the ridiculous idea about demographics. Segmentation based on demographics often ends up being a waste of time. You segment based on behavior, specifically using a tool like the one I use called the Meaningful/Actionable grid.

• Target specific segments: I was chatting with some folks at a few teams and leagues around the world to talk through the idea that when you segment based on behavior, you can often identify specific customers that you deal with. The point I wanted to push further was that when you look at behavior, you get out of these predetermined verticals like “churches”, “schools”, or “little league”. Then you get into actions and that opens up the world to you. So make sure you spend some time on targeting because looking at the behaviors in your market often opens up opportunities for you to expand your business and your verticals in a very natural way, building off of your current successes and people’s behaviors.

Start with those three steps. This opens the door to positioning after you’ve targeted because you likely aren’t going to be everything to everyone. And, as you move to start selling, you can have a better understanding of where to price your product, how to create products that will overcome reluctance in your customers, and where to sell and promote your tickets.

3. Outdoor shows are moving forward but what will stick around as lessons learned:

Key Points:

• Some lessons we’ve learned from the pandemic should stick around like willingness to change.

• Technology can help us get closer to our customers and drive them to live events.

• We are still likely to see ups and downs through the end of the year.

More and more outdoor events are coming online.

Wimbledon will have fans, but Pearl Jam has canceled their summer tour of Europe.

Ups and downs.

The story of the last year or so has been adaptation, yes and no.

We’ve seen a lot of people adapt to the pandemic like the Providence dance company putting on a show in the parking lot early on in the pandemic when people were still trying to figure a lot out. The Paris Opera recording a new production now to be broadcast online that they will revive when they are able to welcome guests. And, many organizations changing their digital delivery of content to keep their fans engaged throughout the pandemic.

This time has been one where we have had to get comfortable with innovation and change.

The way that venues around the world have adapted to create environments where they can safely host shows and performances for people has been amazing with the bubble concerts that the Flaming Lips have put on in OKC, Dave Chappelle doing shows all over including in his neighbor’s field, and parking lots and drive-ins around the world!

As we come through the tunnel on this thing, we should see that we have a greater capacity to adapt and innovate than we might have imagined. Most of the time the challenge is in our head. We get stuck in looking at the things we have tried over the years that didn’t work. Instead of focusing on all the possibilities of what great things we could achieve if we took a risk.

Now we can see what happened when we have no choice but to try and make things work.

Here are three things I hope will stick around after the pandemic:

• A willingness to embrace change. I did the 101 ways to market, sell, and monetize your event ebook after someone told me at a conference that they were limited in the ways that they could make money! Bull! You can change at any time, but you have to know it isn’t always easy, folks aren’t going to just embrace the new, and there isn’t a guarantee of success.

• Embrace new spaces. The NHL had a game on Lake Tahoe. That looked amazing! Drive-in shows or Dave Chappelle’s neighbor’s field…I’m into going to places I’ve never seen. Pearl Jam has said they often schedule their tour dates so they can give their fans unique places to visit. One of the places I loved was Pink Pop because it really was in the middle of nowhere when I went. It was amazing! Let’s go places that don’t traditionally get shows!

• Use technology as a feeder to the big stuff. Meaning, technology should be like an Amuse-bouche, a little taste to whet your appetite. I’ve watched live streams, replays, and other versions of shows and events over the last year and nothing compares to being at a live event. But, I’m not the market either. Coming out of the pandemic, we have to make sure we use technology to bridge the gap to get people to consume the content digitally and remotely, but also to push them to the good stuff…live.

4. I was on TV in NYC talking prices:

Key Points:

• Pricing is the most important button you can push. For every 1% price improvement you get, you gain 10.3% profit on average, most of my research puts the number at 12-13%.

• Discounts will destroy your brand. For every 1% you discount, you lose 40% of your profit.

• Pricing demands research and can’t be done willy nilly.

I told my wife I wanted to become better at getting press when the pandemic started since I could do it from home now.

Mission accomplished!

Fox 5! The Washington Post! Wall Street Journal! The Independent! The BBC! The CBC! ESPN!

I could go on, but even I’m starting to mock myself.

Anyway, my new friends at Fox 5 asked me to talk about ticket pricing for Opening Day and beyond.

And, that comes on the heels of Ken Troupe asking me to talk pricing during his #social4tixsales chat on Twitter.

I’ve become known for my rants on discounts.

Today, I’m going to share a few ideas from my upcoming ebook on post-pandemic pricing because I feel like it is too easy to look at revenue at the expense of profit.

My lens for pricing: It isn’t what you make, but what you keep that matters most. Profits are the ultimate barometer of your pricing success.

I’m going to give you my three big pricing takeaways to gnaw on this morning:

First, pricing is marketing’s moment of truth.

In fact, it is the most important marketing moment you are likely to deal with because it is the point where you capture some of the value you have created for your market.

If you want a proxy for how I’ll judge you as a marketer, let’s look at “The Pricing Gap” which is the distance between the true economic value and the perceived value.

In tickets, we can also add a third number since most people have gotten so wed to discounts that they run their brand into the ground.

COGS should be a floor. The True Economic Value is the ceiling. You should be aiming to get as close to the Perceived Value of your product or service as possible.

Second, pricing demands research.

The perception of your price is just as important as the price itself.

We have to study post-purchase price perception to have a better understanding of what an accurate price is.

You do this using quantitative data because qualitative data is too easy to game. Remember what I’ve told you about people saying they love discounts.

You can also study pricing using tools like trade-off analysis, real-time price experimentation, and the Van Westendorp Pricing Model.

Finally, don’t discount.

Discounts show me you have a bad, or, worse, no strategy.

Discounts are the fastest way to destroy your brand.

When you discount, you open the door in your market’s brain that you are a discount brand and you can’t shut that door for the better part of a decade. 7 years on average, if you want the Cliff Notes.

Why do I bring this up?

Pricing is the biggest issue I see in my research across the industry and across the world.

People really struggle with it and there is a lot of bad guidance on pricing.

Here are some things to hold onto:

• Price is the most important lever your business can push. If you gain 1% on the price, you typically get around a 10% increase in profits. When you discount 1%, you lose 40% of your profit.

• There is a crazy tendency to underprice. In my research across industries, 80-90% of businesses underprice leading to lower revenues, fewer sales, fewer profits, a weaker brand, fixing your price at a lower level, getting into price wars…I can go on.

• Like everything else, pricing is a process.

Price is too important to fall prey to things like “loss leader” pricing for tickets, discounts, or just glancing at what everyone else is doing.

You have to get the price right because it is literally the most important marketing decision you are going to make.

5. “A Light at the End of the Tunnel”:

Key Points:

• Australia is teaching us what the future after the pandemic might look like.

• Buying patterns are emerging, but we haven’t captured enough data to draw conclusions yet.

• Context matters. There is no one size fits all approach to recovery.

Australia’s theatre season is rolling out!

Yippee!

I’m also frantically searching in these pieces for any mention of Jo or Angela!

WTF world press!

As we see more and more shows make their openings in Australia, we are going to learn more and more lessons. We will begin to see audience reaction to Covid protocols, buying patterns and how they match pre-pandemic buying habits, and a lot more.

All good stuff!

In Paris, the Paris Opera is showing us another path forward with masks and soloists without masks.

I’ve said over the years that the arts is one of the greatest gifts we have to explain the world we live in. And, as we watch what arts organizations are doing around the world, we are also going to learn a lot about the world we will emerge into once the pandemic is behind us.

As we close out the week together, looking at all of these stories from around the world, I want to leave you with a few parting thoughts as you keep focusing on the future:

• Context matters. There are typically no all right or all wrong decisions. Look for the context in each situation to help guide you forward. This works for pricing, strategy, sales, and branding…well, everything.

• Follow the data, look to historical examples, and check behaviors. My marketing professor taught me that the only right answer to anyone’s random marketing question is “I don’t know, but I can find the answer” and then run off and do research. Let that instinct guide you now.

• Your brand matters and it is the accumulation of all of the good and bad interactions your customers have with you. As we head to the other side of the pandemic, it probably pays to make sure that you are allowing your brand to be represented in the way that you want it to be.

See you next week.

——————————————————————————-

I’m off to another soccer fiesta today. This time in Ellicott City. So I can sleep in my own bed. So I’m in DC! Final Moderna on the 6th, maybe I’ll go to a baseball game on the 8th!

Chatted to Simon Mabb this week. The Booking Protect team has some really exciting case studies and use cases around refund protection as tickets have started to go on sale. Check-in with Simon, Cat, Cath, and the team.

See what the Activity Stream team is up to as they work on some new features to help you turn your data into actionable insights.

Finally, one of the coolest things I get to do in normal times is travel. I’ve mentioned my visit to Australia a lot lately and one of the mates I got to see was Ben Newton. Ben and his mates have created a baseball club in Australia called Mordialloc Ducks. They have some cool merchandise that they just launched to support the club and keep growing the team in Australia. I just bought the on-field hat…maybe you want to support Australian baseball as well!