Talking Tickets 27 May 2022: Motley Crue and StubHub! Champions League! Market Research! And, More!
#137
Good morning!
I’m cleared for action and I’m going to use my holiday weekend to lay out my goals and plans for the rest of the year, but I’m hoping to get to the following locations between now and the end of 2022:
Sydney
London
New York City
Los Angeles
I’ll have the ins and outs of these things planned over the weekend.
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To the Tickets!
1. The Big Story: Craig Thompson talks us through the creation of the Champions League:
Big Ideas:
Sports has less than 10% of fan data! Whoa! This doesn’t mean that teams and folks don’t have too much data, but is it the right data?
The best ideas get resistance.
Change is constant.
I really enjoyed this conversation on how the Champions League came to be.
Who will win Saturday’s match?
I’ve got my eyes on Liverpool, but I wouldn’t count out Real Madrid.
Anyway, back to this conversation with Craig Thompson.
He hit a lot of ground and the entire conversation is worth the listen, especially if you feel like everything is wildly different now because Craig hits on some of the highlights of the launch of the Champions League and they sound pretty similar to anything that might get launched now.
What do I mean?
The more things change, the more they stay the same.
The Champions League seems like a great idea, now. But at the time of the launch, no one really was sure that they should make the leap. The top teams were reluctant to put in together on a big tournament. There were technology challenges, ticketing issues, and egos galore.
What’s different now?
Not a lot.
I say that this way because we should all recognize that even the best ideas face resistance.
To go one move further, we should probably be concerned if our ideas have too much consensus at the start because that might mean we aren’t pushing hard enough.
On the other side of this ledger, we also need to recognize that change is constant.
In Craig’s telling of the story, there hit a point where resistance to the idea was futile. At some point, we are all faced with a moment where the way things were can’t ever be achieved again.
Think about how the secondary market and primary market have merged in customer’s thinking in the States, that isn’t going to change anytime soon.
Or, the way that digital tickets have taken over? Again, not likely to change anytime soon.
What about the level of competition in the market? That’s not going away. In fact, it is likely to get worse in the months and years ahead.
So change is a constant and managing the process of change is a requirement of modern life.
Eventually, that’s what the clubs in UEFA decided as well.
The final point that has stuck with me is Craig’s point about how little data teams and leagues really have on fans.
Craig says it is less than 10%.
I’m not sure I could give you a guess about whether or not I think Craig’s number is too low or too high, but I would definitely agree with Craig when I said that in most cases that teams and leagues have a lot less of an understanding of their customers than you might assume because even in the situations where teams have a lot of fan data, the data is incomplete and only focused in one specific area.
Meaning: it is accurate, but incomplete. This means that the utility of the data is limited. You can make better decisions, but if you base every decision on the data you have, that isn’t a wise decision. You’ll always need to dig deeper.
Again, give the full conversation a listen.
In action:
Find ways to complete the fan portrait. You want to have a more complete image of your fans than what you pick up from their buying habits in the venue.
Create a plan to win over the argument for your plan. Change doesn’t happen without a champion.
Come up with alternative plans and ways to achieve your goals.
2. The Road to Recovery: F1 ticket sales soar as the popularity of the sports grows:
Big Ideas:
We touched on the importance of brand awareness last week. This continues that conversation.
Expanding the market for your product is wise business right now.
Don’t discount the limited nature of these events.
I’ve never been to F1, but I’m totally going to go to one of the classic races. I’d like to go to Dubai or Monte Carlo.
Anyway, last week we discussed brand awareness and F1.
Today, we are talking about how that has helped F1 increase ticket sales because the first part of a successful ticket sales effort is to increase brand awareness.
I’ve talked about my conversation with Ruth Hartt about the “Jobs to Be Done” theory in the past. While brand awareness has nothing to do with the theory, the theory and brand awareness are key to understanding the power of broadening the market for your awareness messaging.
Why?
Because people likely aren’t looking for a car race. I’m guessing that even folks that are into F1 aren’t really looking for a car race, but they are looking for some fun or a thing to do with their mates.
You need to drive long-term brand awareness because in most instances, around 95% or more of the market isn’t in the market for your product or service at any time. But brand awareness helps ensure that when they are, you have a chance to be at the top of their mind when they start looking for that “job to be done”.
In today’s environment, expanding the reach of your message is key because loyalty attention is likely to have a certain limit in your ability to win enough people back to your venues to achieve a successful recovery as the pandemic continues to impact sales, travel, and life.
I would be remiss in not pointing out an obvious point of consideration here. As we’ve noticed over the last few months, the one-off or big events like a concert or a Game 7 of a playoff series have had much more traction in the market when compared to a random regular season series or even baseball’s Opening Day in some markets.
In the case of F1, we shouldn’t lose sight of the limited nature of these events to drive their demand up as well.
But that’s a different conversation if we are in search of solutions there.
In action:
Think long and short. Not just sales activation, but brand building.
Tell emotional stories. Those build your brand.
Create a sense of urgency in your purchase path by limiting availability, communicating the impact of attendance, or growing a sense of community.
3. How-To: Amanda Lester drops lots of market research knowledge:
Big Ideas:
Everyone can and should be doing some form of market research.
To make it easier for people to buy, you need to de-risk the purchase for them.
Develop a hypothesis for your organization.
Great podcast guest for y’all this week, Amanda Lester.
As she mentions at the start, her work began as a musician informed her decision to get into the marketing side of the business.
For a long time I’ve been writing about the need to do more market research, so I’m a believer.
But Amanda lays out a lot more information and I found myself taking tons of notes throughout our conversation.
The big idea that stuck with me was this idea around creating a hypothesis for your market research.
We’ve covered the way I teach folks about market research by doing it backward.
The idea that drives this way of thinking is the need to have a guide for your research and thinking.
So begin with the idea that you need a hypothesis to focus your actions.
Building off of that, Amanda is even more forceful than me when she talks about research happening too late, not nearly as much as is needed, and without a real focus!
Go Amanda! Go!
The secret of market research is that you should be doing some form of research constantly. You can do small scale stuff like individual conversations or ethnography. You can go a bit higher with focus groups. Occasionally, you need to do some sort of big study of the market.
Another secret to market research is to start with Google.
If you are smart about your questions, you can find a lot of secondary research on Google.
The key is that you need to constantly be in the market to know what people want and to figure out how to offer more value.
Finally, your research can help you understand your market and make more sales more quickly by providing a less risky purchase environment.
This is the key idea that is at play with Booking Protect and some of the messages they have been sharing lately about protecting your brand, improving your service, and helping make the purchase path more complete for customers.
In the end, that comes down to de-risking the purchase for a customer.
That’s the beauty of market research:
You know your customers better.
You are guided by better questions.
You find the keys to unlock your customer’s desire to purchase.
In Action:
Come up with a guiding question for your company or research.
Look for buying behaviors and what people value. You aren’t your market.
Stay in the market doing research all the time. It doesn’t have to be huge surveys. It can be a conversation but stay in the market.
4. Tech/Tools/Profile: StubHub claims Motley Crue will be their biggest concert of the summer:
Big Ideas:
A quick look at the sales pages for these shows makes this data seem a bit questionable.
Consumer spending is strained by inflation.
The busiest season for amount of shows just means that you’ll see a lot of shows with a lot of empty seats.
I’m going to be short with this one because I’m not sure how much validity to put into these numbers. Just by the looks of the different pages, it seems like there are tons of seats still available.
Why do I question the 27,000 per show number?
That’s more than an amphitheater where something like this would typically go down and might still struggle to sell out.
Another thing that makes me question some of these numbers are the ticket prices. They are pretty high.
I know from reading my morning Wall Street Journal that consumer credit card debt has been rising for the last few months, wages have risen but not at the rate of inflation, and there is saturation in the market due to the number of shows that are on sale.
This brings me to the final point here, the busiest season in memory is great. But you also have to move a ton of seats. And, there are a number of factors working against all of these seats being filled like prices, other competition, and concerns about being in crowds because the data shows that there is still lingering impact from virus concerns along with a new wave that I’ve dubbed the YOLO wave since everyone is talking about “Covid being over.”
I don’t know about you, but I wouldn’t take Motley Crue to the bank as being the biggest hit of the summer. But I’m both an optimist in life and a pessimist when it comes to business.
What say you?
5. Links and Blurbs:
On appeal, Viagogo loses their case in Australia: First off, what a great domain name for this site: crikey.com?! I include this because I think reading these pieces from Australia shows you a different perspective on the secondary market and helps you see the differences between the States and the rest of the world when it comes to the secondary market. Viagogo is also in the news for not delivering Eurovision tickets!
Audiencing is a real thing and it is pretty cool: Hannah Grannemann shares some new ideas about what it means to be a member of an audience for her blog on ArtsJournal. I like the way that the term audiencing is explained…it is the act of being a part of an audience and I think if we all think about it, going to a show or an event is partly a learned experience. Don’t believe me, go see a soccer match in Europe, a Phish concert, or the symphony. How can we make the experience more natural or fun?
The sale of Anaheim’s stadium is jammed up in a corruption investigation: Stadium deals and boondoggle often go hand in hand. This will be interesting to see how the investigation pans out.
K Pop festival expected to draw 50,000 to the O2 Arena: K Pop is a sensation. This is another example of the power of K Pop to draw crowds.
BMW and the Kentucky Derby combined to offer a new take on sponsorship activation: I was involved with some activations over the years and this doesn’t seem that far out, but I do recognize that BMW does a good job with long-term brand building and this is a good way to continue that.
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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.
I had a new podcast drop this week with Asher Weiss, CEO of Tixologi. We talked about blockchain tickets, market research, making better decisions using data, and a lot more. Asher’s starting point was value and that’s not always common in tech companies. So check it out!
Let me know who you’d like to hear from by sharing your ideas with me here.