Talking Tickets 20 May 2022: Bayer Leverkusen In Mexico! AFL Memberships! The Growth of Women's Sports! Planning in the Arts! And, More!
Number 136!
Hey y’all!
Good news, Dave has been cleared to travel again! I’m on the up and up again. Coming soon, the Dave recovery tour 2022!
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Let’s get to the tickets!
1. The Big Story: Bayer Leverkusen shows us brand building:
Big Ideas:
Brand awareness has been working for F1 and is likely to work in the case of Bayer Leverkusen.
The history of your club matters, a lot.
You have to take control of your brand building because there is no guarantee that anyone will do it well for you.
This is a good way to start the week when I’ve been clearance to return to my normal activities since most of the work I’ve been doing has had an element of brand strategy and corporate strategy.
And, that’s likely to continue and increase because recovery will require a greater emphasis on three interlocking concepts:
Strategy
Brand
Marketing
The first thing that jumps out to me in the above story is the way that the strategies of the football club and the corporate owners are working together to drive awareness for both brands with this tour of Mexico.
For a lot of folks, strategy is a word that is misused or misunderstood because folks aren’t clear on the definition or they are using it to refer to tactics.
In my telling, strategy entails answering questions and making choices.
No answers, no strategy.
No choices, no strategy.
The big decision is to define success.
What does success look like?
You move on to define your target market, your value proposition, the resources you need, and the actions you will take.
Again, in “The Whiteboard Workshop” or many of my public workshops, we do this. So that you can take new, focused actions right away.
What’s on display in this example is the power of the combination of both brands playing together.
There is no bones about this being a tool to promote the 100th anniversary of Bayer being in Mexico. But what isn’t explicitly laid out is that this highlights a powerful idea in branding which is the power of your history, your founder, and your actions over time to enhance the strength of your brand and give you greater ability to penetrate your market.
This action is Brand Building 101.
The second idea that I like in this story is the focus on building brand awareness across Mexico, North America, and Central America.
A few weeks ago, we talked about F1 and the success of bringing the sport to new markets like Miami, but one topic we haven’t touched on a lot is that one of the big brand building activities that F1 has undergone is their Netflix show.
I’d also put the NFL in this category with the success of Hard Knocks over the years.
Why?
Because it highlights another important lesson for any brand managers or marketers, which is the need to look to expand your market to reach more folks…not to just convert the “loyalists” that might already be interested in your team or events. As Professor Byron Sharp calls it, “go for penetration”.
When I chatted with Ruth Hartt about the “Jobs to be Done” theory, this idea is at the heart of all of what folks need to think about now because often folks might not necessarily think about going to a baseball game, a concert, or the theatre until you make it explicit that this is fun, a good way to entertain folks or some other thing that they are looking for.
You have to expand the reach of your marketing to hit more people.
This brings me to the final point: you have to do this work on your own.
For far too long, too many businesses, especially in sports, have left too much of the marketing job up to their partners like Nike, Under Armour, Adidas, etc.
That’s not good enough.
Just like too many organizations in the arts and theatre have fallen down the rabbit hole of only doing tactics.
Again, not good enough.
You need to get your arms around the totality of the job at hand from understanding what success looks like, to the market you serve, to your value proposition, and on.
Establishing a brand is difficult work. It takes focus and effort.
Building a strategy is hard work. You need to find a through line.
And, tactically, the job is tougher and tougher because their is more noise, more competition, and more demand for people’s attention. Also, we are seeing that behaviors are changing like Corey Leff points out in his newsletter this week with the decline in group sales for sports teams.
The “unified” ticketing strategy is something I talked about with Kate Howard a while back and it still makes sense for anyone to have a look at their distribution methods for their tickets because it really touches all four of the Ps in the marketing mix and is essentially a huge part of the implementation of your marketing strategy.
Let’s put this in action:
Start at the beginning by looking at what you want to achieve. You need to define success to ensure that your strategy is focused in the same direction as your tactics.
Know that brand building is more important now than ever before. There is more competition, more noise, and more friction in your customer journey than ever before.
Get your mind wrapped around your sales strategy. Remember, that the way that tickets are sold, your distribution strategy actually touches all 4 Ps of the marketing mix and this goes a long way to the success or failure of your marketing strategy.
2. The Road to Recovery: AFL reaches 1 million memberships 20 days faster than 2020:
Big Ideas:
2020 was the best year for memberships in AFL history.
As fans have returned to AFL grounds, the sport has returned to a growth footing.
The AFLW is also growing significantly.
I don’t want to say that I’ve been a good luck charm for the Demons, but the Demons have done pretty well since I became a fan!
I’m a fan of the AFL and I think they do some super smart work. Look at the example from North Melbourne.
On the road to recovery, the AFL has a few things going for them.
First, 2020 was the most successful year of membership sales yet with over 1.1 million members. That’s approximately 1 in 25 Australians that have an AFL membership. That’d be comparable to if American clubs sold real memberships and there were 14,000,000 members.
That’s a lot.
This year, they are on pace for more.
Second, the return of fans to grounds has helped accelerate the growth of the AFL. So far this season, AFL attendance is up around 31%.
Those are real turnstile numbers for the people in the back, none of this tickets distributed stuff.
Finally, in the case of the AFL, a rising tide is lifting all boats because the AFLW is also seeing growth with the most memberships in their history being sold this year as well.
I’ve talked about how wise the AFLW marketing is in the past, but looking at the growth of the AFLW, the WNBA, and women’s soccer in many countries, smart money would put more money behind women’s sports.
3. How To: Planning in an ever-changing environment:
Big Ideas:
Do you think of strategy as a one-time event?
Where are you flexible?
Remember, strategy is about choice.
This could really be the big story this week.
It is a nice compilation of what a strategy can look like now.
I’ll give you a quick spin through the strategy notes I keep on my desk instead of going through the full article and analyzing it because I want you to spend the time necessary to read this one.
But here are some bullets from my notes on planning and strategy in an ever-changing environment:
Make notes of expected outcomes so you can know whether or not your decisions are paying off or not.
Just because you are in a constantly changing environment, it doesn’t mean you don’t plan. Planning is even more important.
Be prepared to make adjustments to your decisions quickly. While the through line of your strategy is likely to stay the same, the tactics that you use to reach your destination may not.
Understand what success looks like.
Be willing to use ideas from outside of your industry or vertical like with tickets, look at other countries. If you are in theatre, look at sports. Or, look at B2B sales.
Be prepared to fight the reliability bias…which is code for “the way we’ve always done things” like setting up 100 kids in a bullpen to “smile and dial”.
Recognize that in this environment, it is impossible to manage for certainty. See the above article about group sales.
Focus on progress not perfection.
These are all bullets from an upcoming workshop that I will deliver. But I’d be curious if you all have thumbnails for strategy that you follow.
Let me know.
4. Tech/Tools/Profile: Crypto crashes…what does that mean for sponsorships:
Big Ideas:
The rapid jump of gambling, cryptocurrencies, and NFTs is concerning because as an industry sports doesn’t innovate that rapidly.
Your assets aren’t protected if your crypto wallet goes bankrupt.
How many of these deals are really going to go to their conclusion?
My poor crypto wallet!
I’m old enough to have lived through the dot come bust back around 2000. I’ve lived through the 2008 financial crisis.
A crypto crash is just another in a long line of bubbles bursting at my house.
What is problematic here is that this could have a real impact on folks in sports business because like gambling, many organizations have jumped into NFTs and cryptocurrencies with both feet when some teams are still using relatively basic CRM systems, email campaigns, and other technologies.
Is it going to end well?
I’m not so sure.
Because these are speculative currencies, if there is a bankruptcy it is unlikely that anyone will find many assets to claim. And, for investors, a big surprise could come when they find out that their assets can disappear in a bankruptcy as well.
Now to the fun part, a prediction on how many of these deals with go to completion? I’m guessing less than 25%. To be more accurate, I’d need to do some research on what these deals really look like.
5. Blurbs and Such:
Come on, I’m putting this one in for the title alone: Pricing is important and is taking a place at the forefront, but keep in mind that value is in the eye of the purchaser as well.
StubHub touts a 25% increase in ticket sales over 2019: Ahh, but the devil is in the details because the report goes on to tell you that there are 50% more shows in 2022 than 2019. So that tells a different story, no?
UEFA warns of Champions League tickets bought on the secondary market: Should I take the boy’s Uncle Neil to see his team, Liverpool, in the final? That’s the real question here.
Harry Styles and ‘Verified Fan’: I’ve been giving the ‘Verified Fan’ program the side eye for years because of the Taylor Swift, merchandise, and boosts situation. It isn’t that I don’t think the program can work because I think it can if the artist wants it to, but in most cases the program is used just like Ticket News points out as a data grab. And, as we’ve been going over for a while now, these businesses are overloaded with data and their ability to make actionable insights out of the data still isn’t up to par.
Tixngo goes to Wembley: Wembley will be able to create their own mobile wallet. This is pretty cool and it will be a great case study in adaptation of mobile technology.
US Soccer agrees to pay men and women the same amount: Looking at the results the women have achieved the last few years, I’d argue they deserve better pay.
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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 technology 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.
Listen to the podcast. I released a conversation with Paul Williamson from Two Circles’s office in London. Paul has worked on many of the highest profile events in the world including the Olympics. We hit on that and his love of The Rolling Stones. Give it a listen.
Let me know who you’d like to hear from by sharing your ideas with me here.