Talking Tickets 20 August 2021: Back From Vegas! MLB and Barstool! Messi, PSG, and Me! SeatGeek Rebrands! And, Much More!
Number 98
Hey There!
We made it through Vegas and if you were there, did you have fun?!
We can discuss themes and ideas from Vegas next week, but I want to thank Don Vaccaro and the Ticket Summit team, Bill Dorsey and the ALSD team, and the ECHL for putting together an in-person conference with people from all over the industry. If you didn’t know better, it was almost normal.
I’m going to try and think up something cool to do for issue 100. Maybe a giveaway or something. If you have any ideas, let me know.
Forgive this edition’s grammatical errors…5 days in Vegas is hard on productivity.
To the tickets!
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Big Ideas:
Messi has a lot of brand power and PSG and their owners can use that to build up their own brand equity.
Over the last few years, PSG has worked hard to build its brand into a global, luxury brand. Messi could open even more doors.
Just having Messi around will create more opportunities for traditional packages and ideas.
Well, well, well…look who has now made it into an article about sports marketing and branding!
I’m still a bit miffed that the team managed to only have 150,000 jerseys ready to drop when the signing was announced that seems a bit weak, but I’ve also never received my entire order correctly from a certain retail partner.
At the heart of this is the idea of PSG and Messi as brands and the way that you can turn your brand value into products.
What do I mean?
That we are going to look at this idea of brand equity as the accumulation of all touchpoints, good and bad equalling your brand.
Let me explain.
There are three levels of thinking when two brands come together:
Line extension happens within a category and lets you bring new products to the market. Think of the way that this season the Boston Red Sox introduced a 40 game package to their market to reflect changes brought on by the pandemic.
Brand extension is when you move into a new category together. PSG is already doing this with its partnership with Nike.
Co-branding is what happens you team up to create an entirely new product. We haven’t seen it a lot in sports and entertainment, but think about an airline rewards credit card and you get the point of this. A key point to keep in mind is that when co-branding, the good stuff for both brands typically stays around and the bad stuff is left behind.
How does this help the two partners?
The line extension idea is pretty straightforward because a Messi and PSG partnership will just open the door for PSG to offer entirely new ticket packages, merchandise, sponsorships, and media packages.
With the brand extension, there are some cool things that could happen because the opportunity is there for PSG, Messi, and their partners to combine to enter new areas like travel, hospitality, or luxury…even more than they are now.
Co-branding is another area where this could become pretty interesting as I’m sure it isn’t entirely unbelievable to think that PSG’s ownership could use their partnership with Messi to help co-brand events and activities around the upcoming World Cup. Or, PSG could use their partnership with Messi to expand even further into the luxury fashion scene because Messi may carry even more weight than Mbappe and Neymar when it comes to the feel of luxury.
What you can expect from this is that there will be plenty of new marketing opportunities for the team.
I’ve found that the PSG marketing team does a pretty good job of understanding the power of branding, building brand equity, and using the tools of modern branding to create brand extensions that really work.
(I’ve got a PSG pullover from the first year of their Jordan brand partnership. To this day, I’ve had more people stop me around DC to want to talk PSG than I have ever had with anything Spurs-related. The wider world is different, but I guess there is a huge PSG fan base in DC!)
You should also see the team have the ability to improve their monetization of tickets, hospitality, and partnerships. And, it should elevate the demand for all of these things at the same time.
And, you should see PSG and Messi break into new areas that you might not have seen them move into before. Just one example could be a partnership between Messi, PSG, and a French winemaker…since Messi already is involved in Argentinian wine and Paris is French.
As an aside, I can’t wait to get back to France.
2. Fanatics is interested in getting into the ticket game:
Big Ideas:
Strategy is about choice. As much about what you won’t do as what you will do.
What are your core competencies? Doing one thing well might mean not being able to do another thing well.
Strategy before tactics.
Ahhh, yes. Everyone wants to be in tickets now. I wrote about Spotify recently and everywhere you look, you see people investigating new ideas for growth.
All of a sudden Fanatics has new funding round and a new valuation and they are looking at tickets, gambling, and media. And, as I’m sitting down to write this, they’ve just stolen baseball cards from Topps.
This is a lot to get into all at once.
I bring this up because it can be easy for a business to think that they are going to get into everything all at once.
In truth, there are many examples of businesses trying to expand to quickly and having trouble.
A few examples that could be illustrative are how quickly Crumbs came and went, the rise and fall of Zynga, or how Ford has struggled at times by trying to put too many models and brands out into the world to the point of losing their focus.
There are three ideas to keep in mind here:
Strategy before tactics is essential to success.
Strategy is ultimately about choice.
Every business has core competencies.
Let me run through each of these quickly.
First, strategy before tactics seems to have caught on with y’all. I heard it from several folks in Vegas…and, I’m glad.
The saying really just means that you have to know where you are going before you start down the path to getting there.
In this case, Fanatics is the world’s largest home of licensed merchandise, but does that mean that tickets, betting, and media are going to add to their strategic efforts?
Or, is it just a way to justify an ever-growing valuation?
Why do I ask?
Because strategy is about choice.
It is as much about what you don’t do as what you do.
In reading about all of Fanatic’s plans, you have to ask what aren’t they going to try and do.
Because we have merchandise, retail, eCommerce, gambling, tickets, media, cards, and more.
This leads me to the third idea of core competencies.
This should come as no surprise to anyone, but all businesses do some things better than others.
Those are your core competencies.
Let me share a quick story with you about my trip back from Las Vegas.
As any of you that have been here for more than a few weeks know, I spent much of the lockdown period rethinking what I want to have going on with my business. That leads to research, strategy, web development, and more.
So as I flew back from Vegas, I spent some time taking stock of my own core competencies to make sure everything I had been thinking was aligned with these new areas of emphasis.
What I came down upon is that I think I do a few things well:
I’m a good teacher.
I’m a good marketer.
I’m a good strategist.
I learn by writing, teaching, and speaking.
And, these skills come out best in an advisory role because I also can use the teaching ability to help more people take more action.
Those are my core competencies.
Back to Fanatics and their investigation of ticketing, it is a hard business. Gambling, a hard business. Merchandising, a hard business. Logistics, a hard business. I can go on, but I think you see the pattern here.
The thing is that the danger they face is that they try to do too much and end up not doing anything well.
This same advice applies to all of us.
One, in Las Vegas, I met quite a few brokers that had really nailed down a strategy and one that allowed them to really focus on a couple of things that they do really well.
Two, the essence of strategy is choice. I was at dinner on Saturday night and we were discussing all the different areas where folks in the secondary market find to make money. And, as soon as the list was thought to be complete, we’d find new ways to add to the list.
Third, no one can do everything well.
You have to know what you are good at and drill down on that. Trying to do too much is a recipe for disaster.
Just look at the work I’ve done during the pandemic to see the wisdom in making a choice build on what you do well.
3. SeatGeek rebrands and has a new ad campaign to go along with it:
Big Ideas:
If you’ve been around for any period of time, you’ll know that I regularly hit on the idea of the brand and the importance of brand.
At its core, your brand needs to stamp 3 or 4 words or phrases onto your customers’ brains like:
1,000 songs in your pocket still sticks with me about iPod.
Blockbuster night did for movies when it was tapes and “Netflix and chill” are stand-ins now.
Discounts are for dummies.
The thing is that you should be able to feel your brand through the 4 Ps of your marketing strategy:
Product
Price
Place
Promotion
And, the slogans, design, or colors don’t make the brand, the meaning to the customer does all of that.
What do I think about rebranding generally?
First, we have to recognize that if you are undertaking the effort of a rebrand, you need to keep in mind a few key things:
Rebranding is a big job going beyond the visuals and the communications.
Rebranding can undermine your hard-won brand assets.
Rebranding can be a poor fix for larger business issues.
Second, we need to make sure we are expressing our brand in every touchpoint internally and externally.
Finally, we have to realize that as much as we might hope for it…we don’t define the meaning of the brand, the customer does.
How does this apply to SeatGeek’s efforts and those of any of us doing some brand work?
First, any type of brand work takes consistency over time.
That’s job one.
Don’t start down this road if you aren’t going to complete the task at hand because most repositioning fails at the first hiccup and things go back to “normal”. Just look at a decade of BP’s repositioning work that got flushed when they had the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.
Neither, my rebrand or SeatGeek’s is going to have that kind of negative impact on the environment, but it is good to remember that the deck is stacked against your business. So you have to commit.
Second, make sure that the brand issue isn’t the sign of a bigger issue.
A branding issue can help fix an awareness and marketing issue, but you have to go through the entire process to ensure you aren’t solving the wrong problem.
In looking at SeatGeek’s message around their rebrand, this effort reflects the knowledge that they had become too product-oriented at the expense of their brand.
Do you know what that means?
If the follow-through and consistency is there, they will have an opportunity to be successful because they’ve turned the lens from their POV to the customers’. That’s Market Orientation.
Finally, always keep in mind that you don’t define value, the customer does.
And, that goes double for your brand.
So when you come up with a great ad campaign, idea, or new feature, recognize that it isn’t about you, but about the customer.
If they don’t like it, you are out.
Nothing you can do about it.
4. MLB looks to hook up with Barstool for a rights’ deal:
Big Ideas:
The strategy, once again, is at the heart of the story involving MLB.
Wanting younger viewers is great, but you segment by behavior, not by age.
Positioning is about choice.
Ahhh, yes. This story.
Even if it wasn’t significant talks between Barstool and MLB, it brought out a lot of opinions.
I’ll stay away from the Barstool discussion to focus on the core issue here which is the need to work through the holy trinity of marketing:
Segmentation
Targeting
Positioning
Let’s begin at the top.
Segmentation is drawing a map of your market.
How do you do this?
Research, y’all, using primary and secondary sources, going from qualitative to quantitative. Starting with the end in mind and designing from there.
If you are doing your segmentation correctly, you are killing the hypothetical customer by embracing the complexity of the customer.
How do you do this?
By focusing on the behaviors that drive customers to action, not arbitrary variables like age.
I love this illustration from a presentation by Business International Group:
MLB is often credited with wanting and needing a younger demographic, but that’s too general and doesn’t factor in anything but age…that’s lazy and likely unhelpful.
Focus on behavior.
Actions over words.
Then you move to targeting.
If you think of the segmentation as a pie instead of a map, targeting is about picking a good piece of the pie.
There are arguments for mass targeting. One piece of research I wish folks would read is How Brands Grow.
But you have to pick a target for a few good reasons:
Resource constraints
Value
Focus and the 80/20 rule
Targeting is the start of strategy because a choice is required.
Where do you want to play?
Where don’t you want to play?
Finally, you have to position.
You can only position in one of two ways:
You can position yourself about your business.
You can position against another business or option.
Want to do both?
Don’t.
That’s when you really screw it up and fall into the mushy middle.
So…anyway, how does this apply to the world of tickets and MLB?
First, get the diagnosis right.
The kneejerk answer that every article about baseball gives is that they need a younger demographic.
Do you want to know my answer?
It depends.
You have to diagnose the situation first by doing research and segmenting the market.
Second, focus on targeting.
This is a choice and it is the start of the strategy.
Barstool may or may not be the right partner for MLB, but we can’t tell until we get through the parts of the strategy that include diagnosis and the first choice of strategy which is targeting.
Without knowing who you are targeting and what behaviors they exhibit or act upon, you can’t really get down to business by positioning the game the right way.
Again, I don’t have the research in front of me right now.
So my real answer is that it depends, but my guess is that MLB would do a better job positioning about why baseball is awesome as opposed to against the competition.
Having gone to about six games this season since fans could be at games, I can say for sure that there are a few things that baseball does better than other sports:
Uses nostalgia to tell stories.
Creates space for folks to have an experience together.
Is at its best when it is a part of the community.
Those are all really strong things to build campaigns about and are really about the position for the game and not against anything at all.
Back to all of us:
Keep in mind that you always should start with a little bit of research.
I go to my buddy, Google. Then work out.
You’d be surprised what you can find on the internet that will give you tons of actionable insights.
Second, draw your map of the market based on behavior.
I use a tool called the meaningful/actionable grid to do my segmentation and this is a way that I keep myself and my clients focused on the things that matter and drive behavior.
Not just the stuff that is easy to figure out like age or zip code.
Finally, make some choices.
Targeting and positioning are strategies because they force you to choose.
You choose because you have resource constraints, you need to focus, and you are trying to tell a story that will make people pick you over something else.
So don’t be afraid of choice.
5. A few links to close out the week since I’m worn out from Vegas…
West End producers expect that 2022 will be their year!: Keep in mind that we exist in a VUCA environment. VUCA is volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous. Right now, you have to always be aware of trouble so expecting anything with certainty is a bit of a reach. But let’s hope they are right.
NBL gets a lucrative new contract: You’ve always wanted to know that my NBL team is the Sydney Kings. This new deal is exciting because the NBL has really grown to be the second-best basketball league in the world and the talent coming out of there is really strong.
Brazilian futbol clubs want some of the CVC money too: I’m skeptical of these investments in most cases, but this one I’m really skeptical of.
The CMA wants more powers to shut down resale: I’ll come back to this story next week because there is also some StubHub/Viagogo news this week as well, but just keep in mind that the environment for resale is different in every market.
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Check me out on Linktree!
Meet my new buddy, Hayley! She’s the new head of business development. She’s curious, smart, and focused. She also feeds me a lot of good statistics like the one that about 30% of buyers currently are taking up refund protection. So give her and Booking Protect a shout-out to find out what that can mean for your business.
A former classmate of mine, Guy Plumbly, is looking for a technical co-founder on a new idea in sports. Give this listing a look and connect with Guy if you are interested in learning more.
I teamed up with Eventellect to put together a Net Promoter Score worksheet. More and more businesses are using NPS to help them understand where they are winning and losing with their customers. You can by sending me an email to receive this worksheet.
Look at Activate, the new email marketing solution from Activity Stream. You might have been communicating with your audience during the pandemic, you might not. The Activate tool will help you no matter what your email marketing has looked like lately. Talk to Einar and Martin to find out more.