Talking Tickets 26 August 2022: MLB! Getting Customers Back! Music Midtown! And, More!
#150...is that a milestone or do we keep waiting?!
Hey There!
One more week and we end the summer…or that’s the unofficial end of summer.
I’m working, but I’m doing my best European imitation by taking a long holiday this year.
But…y’all still get a newsletter: because you deserve it.
BTW, I’ve been partnering with Maven to do my first cohort course on pricing. Called “Pricing Power”, the first session of this course will focus on small businesses, consultants, and other professional service people to help them set the right price.
While not necessarily 100% focused on ticketing people, still a pretty good chance to learn more about pricing.
We will hit on topics like:
Value Based Pricing
Pricing Research
Pricing Experimentation
And, more!
Check out the course landing page!
To the tickets!
1. The Big Story: Some MLB teams are gaining attendance this season:
Big Ideas:
Trying something new is a smart idea.
Expanding your audience is essential.
I never once heard the word discount.
I enjoyed putting together the list of 10 ideas to improve attendance using the AFL’s challenges the other week. This week, I’m going to highlight 10 ways that you can drive new attendance with inspiration from this article about the teams that are gaining attendance in MLB.
A paying customer in April or September still pays: Discard that idea that people won’t buy in early season or late season because kids are in school or something. Try different angles…if the value proposition works, it works.
Add value, don’t discount: C’mon, the Marlins have a promotion for every day of the week and that’s a great thing. Not a discount in sight!
Don’t wait to win: That’s the lesson from the Marlins and that’s also the brand lesson I shared from the Pistons a few weeks back.
Expand your market reach: New customers are going to be your greatest opportunity. The non-buying segment is always the largest one. But you’ll need to invest in your branding and your sales activation. Not one or the other, but both.
Promotions work: Folks love a t-shirt or a bobblehead. I don’t know that you can overdue these things and you can learn a lot from looking at Minor League Baseball. I still have a kid’s Darth Vader Durham Bulls jersey from their Star Wars night.
Check your pricing: Seriously. Inflation is real, but the inflationary price of tickets has been outrageous for a while and from talking with customers, this has been a problem because the value to price hasn’t been there for a lot of buyers for a long time.
A+B>2A or 2B: Use multiple modes of outreach to hit your target audience.
Consistency: Like the Marlins talk about, you have to make sure you deliver your message over and over to your target customers.
Know your numbers: I love the way that the Marlins know the number of fans that have bought tickets before and the number that are new customers.
If something isn’t working, you likely aren’t going to find success by doing the failing strategy harder: Even though that is often the default move.
Takeaways:
Consistency is key! Whatever you are going to do, be consistent.
Get outside of your core fans, expand the market you are talking to.
Add value, don’t discount. Just look at some of the prices around college football right now…those prices are lower than low in a lot of ways and college football is struggling to hold onto attendance.
2. The Road to Recovery: Fans need a nudge to go back to shows and events:
Keys:
Fans are buying later.
More than 1/3 of folks state they’ve changed their behavior.
55% of people in the UK say that their behavior about going to shows is different now.
This is interesting because it highlights trends we are seeing in a lot of places.
First, we see that 55% of folks in the UK have changed their attitudes about going to live entertainment since lockdowns. Many people in the UK are ready to go back to the pub, but they aren’t as keen on going back to the shows, theatre, or other events.
Second, for live entertainment, somewhere between 30-40% of people aren’t going back to concerts right now. Part of the difference depends on the size of the venues. But we are seeing this in a lot of places.
Third, fans are buying later. I’ve looked at various data from around the world that showed the bubble of late activity that used to be active for around the 72 hours before an event has now shrunk to the last 24 hours.
There can be variance in this, but later buying patterns seem to be a thing that we are going to deal with for a while.
Take action here:
Promote the positive aspects of going to a show, event, theatre, etc. Not from your POV, but from the customers.
Work on getting people to use their tickets. I didn’t have the number of outstanding tickets still out there, but use that as an incentive to help jumpstart the process of going back to the shows!
Find ways to encourage people to buy earlier. Use more value, charge less if you buy earlier, or something else. Recognize people are buying later and don’t discount at the end because that just encourages folks to wait. Try something new.
3. How to: Read survey data to draw insights:
Big Ideas:
Don’t take data at face value.
Look for the story the data tells.
Push to come up with your own ideas from any research you read.
This is a pretty big survey of the performing arts in the UK.
From my POV, this would be what we call secondary research because the Audience Agency has put this together. And, I’m using it to highlight some ideas that I think are important to you.
Let’s take a look at three big ideas this morning so you can have a better grasp on looking at market research in a way that is more similar to the way I read these reports.
First up, we don’t take the data we receive at face value.
Why?
We need to know the parameters and the context of the research to understand how well it was designed. Plus, we need to get an understanding of the survey’s strengths and weaknesses.
Three things to notice here:
We can’t readily find how large the surveyed audience is.
We don’t know the representation of the audience meaning demographically, location, or economically. So it is tough to know what is driving behaviors or whether or not demographic data might be an effective way of looking at this survey.
There is very little baseline data to draw declines or uptakes from.
What does all this mean?
It means that you’ll be able to use the data, it might be interesting, but you’ll still be in the dark about what the survey really means.
You just don’t have enough information to establish a baseline.
Second, look for the story or the throughline of the research.
In this survey, the throughline of the research is trying to establish what the new world of performing arts attendance looks like. The bad side of this effort is that we really lack enough context to make this data help us as much as we might initially think from the percentages, comparisons, and conclusions.
Finally, the magic of any research is that you should be able to formulate your own observations, questions, and ideas from the data.
Here’s what that might look like using my analysis of the situation as an example:
Without knowing the breakdown of the audience, can I test this research in my market to see if their research compares favorably to my area?
Looking at this 66% of people giving a donation number, am I asking for donations enough? Do I know my numbers? How can I improve the number of donations I am receiving?
If I were to survey a representative sample of the population, would that change some of the observations from the survey?
Do I know or can I find out why people are going to performances more or less often?
In this regard, you can use any survey or piece of data to help you focus your thinking, your ideas, and your questions.
The big thing when you are looking at a survey of any kind is to understand the context, look at the strengths and weaknesses, and analyze it.
Even the most poorly designed surveys can provide you with something of value if you flip the ideas around enough.
Action Items:
Find some secondary data to help you think about your market differently.
Check to see what the context of the information is. Is it representative of the audience? Is it well put together? What kinds of questions were used?
Analyze the research and use that to create insights, questions, and ideas of your own. Challenge yourself to come up with 5 or 10 so you get in the habit of going beyond the first level thinking into deeper areas of thought.
4. Tech/Tools/Profiles: Music Midtown shuts down for the year:
Big Ideas:
Economic incentives seem to be the fastest way to create change.
“Guns Rights”?! More like SDE.
The twisting logic of some of these “rules” makes my head hurt.
This doesn’t need a huge amount of coverage, but we are seeing more businesses have to step in and take action due to the absurd number of “culture war” battles that have been on display in America lately.
I grew up in Georgia with guns in the house and I can say from personal experience that allowing free reign to own and carry guns is a stupid idea.
As far as the music festival goes, it seems sort of ridiculous that an event can’t set its own safety standards when the event would be on the hook if something did happen.
So much for “Pro Business”, I guess.
5. Blurbs and Such:
Angel City FC has a different model: The challenge is to build stability and buzz that lasts for many years, but if you start trying new things…you never know what is going to stick or what cool stuff might turn up.
Australian audiences are still going out, despite COVID concerns: It is good to watch Australia and New Zealand because they are having their winter now and we will likely see similar patterns in the Northern Hemisphere in a few months. So, if Australian audiences are still braving it, that likely is a good sign for the rest of us.
Multi-use spaces are popping up everywhere: When I was in London in March, I visited a space that was a bar/coffee bar/podcast studio/standup comedy venue/live music venue. It was cool and despite all of those slashes, totally worked. In DC, there is a new venue that is part brewery/part coffee roaster/part outdoor space/part food truck place…I walked by the other afternoon, it was packed. Now, this place in Denver. I don’t know what trends will really end up emerging from the pandemic, but the need for spaces to do a bit more heavy lifting and having a bit more utility sure does feel like something that might stick around for a while.
You can find me everywhere with my special Linktree! It is all my links!
Be a part of the ‘Talking Tickets’ Slack community.
Check out my friends at Booking Protect!
We continue to see the value of offering refund protection in the data. Feedback shows that the most challenging issues since re-opening have been pretty consistent for teams, theatres, and venues:
Consumer confidence
Changes in buyer behavior
COVID policies coupled with refund or exchange policies.
Offering refund protection helps you provide a solution for these challenges.
Hook up with the team at Booking Protect!
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.