Talking Tickets 29 July 2022: Booking Protect! MLB! Ticket Prices! And, More!
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Hey oh!
How’s everyone doing?
In the continuing tales of Dave’s Long COVID drama, I received a clean bill of health from my cardiologist on Wednesday. I’m 100% back baby!
Don’t let my lack of illness mean you stop sending me nice messages.
I’ve spent the summer time building out some new products and retail ways to work with me. Some wholesale products and services as well.
As we head into the fall, watch these spaces because I’ll be sharing stuff pretty frequently now.
Let me know if anyone is going to see Rage in DC next week. I’m actually going to go out at home. 😄
Congratulations to all my friends at Booking Protect on their acquisition by Cover Genius this week. We will get into the topic and what we can learn from their success below.
To the Tickets!
1. The Big Story: MLB Attendance Down in 21 Markets:
Big Ideas:
Tickets sold vs. through the turnstile is an important consideration.
Looking at the top line revenue number is a dangerous habit to have.
I’m sure pricing and the inflationary pressures of going to a game aren’t a problem at all when it comes to attendance.
I’ve struggled a bit to write about baseball this year because there have been so many stories to draw inspiration from to use to teach you a strategic lesson.
Why do I feel like I’m having a hard time?
No clue. I tried to figure it out, but I couldn’t put a finger on it.
But this article from before the All-Star Game by a friend of the newsletter and the pod, John Wall Street, helped me see some potential ideas to look at this morning.
The gist of Corey’s article is that baseball is down in 21 markets that he could find data for and shortly after we saw it was 23. I know Corey, so his article gets the extra clicks.
Either way, we see baseball attendance down in over 70% of their markets from 2019. And, if I were on the other side of the table, I’d be looking for ways to spin this as not as bad as it seems.
But the eye test right now for the game is just pretty bad.
You name a stadium and more likely than not the attendance won’t look down, but down to the point that you are asking if it is still batting practice or a weather delay going on.
I’m going to do a challenge and opportunity breakdown here because I think it might be more effective at allowing me to make the proper points.
Challenges, first.
First, look at the issues from the right point of view.
That’s my job with most of the people I work with at this point, I am a sounding board to help them move beyond the way that they see things.
And, I see in the way that MLB talks about the attendance issues the challenge of needing to look at attendance from several different perspectives.
Second, branding and brand management.
The brand of baseball has taken some hits and continues to take some hits. Like Lou DePaoli says, death spirals can happen.
The first step in stopping that begins with some serious investigation into the brand strategy.
The third challenge is strategy before tactics.
This shows up in a lot of the situations that I look at or read about when it comes to baseball.
We can probably see the hints of these challenges in a lot of places, but let’s go to the opportunities here.
First, there is still a market for live entertainment. People still want to gather, but you are going to need to market differently.
Second, the amount of product available creates opportunities to brand build almost constantly in-season and that can be a springboard to year-round attention.
Third, despite a decline in attention, attendance, and awareness the distinctive brand assets of MLB are still remarkably strong.
Let’s couple this stuff into solutions now.
First, do some proper strategy work.
Strategy is shown through your actions and I still see the actions that MLB is taking in a lot of places as being disjointed and tactically driven.
In my strategy work, I teach people to walk through 5 steps:
Name your ambition
Pick your market segment
Develop a value proposition
Identify the needed resources
Create an action plan
I also make the action plan something we revisit every 30 days to ensure that we are not getting drawn back into the hot issue or the sexy idea at the cost of the ultimate success.
Second, brand management should be a constant conversation.
Two definitions here:
Branding is the thing.
Brand management is the process of creating the Brand.
Your brand is the accumulation of all of the interactions your market has with you, good or bad, over time. Remember, the good stuff adds up slowly and the bad stuff tears you down with great speed.
Brand management is the process and the process isn’t as hard as people want to make it out to be. I can explain it to you quickly in a couple of bullet points:
What’s our target segment?
What’s the position we are taking?
What are our objectives?
How will we achieve them?
What codes are we going to use to ensure folks know it’s us?
It is slightly more than that, but not much, and if you just focus on these things you are far ahead of most of the competition.
Finally, rethink the way the ticket is packaged and re-scale pricing.
You have to do some market research. I was teaching some folks in Australia about pricing strategy last week and we got onto the idea of pricing research.
The short answer is you can do it and you should do it.
The longer answer is that you need to have a plan that gets you out of your preconceived ideas about your price and that pushes you past the easy things like comparing you to other products or teams in your market.
You are you, they are whatever they are.
To top this off, it is important to always remember that you don’t say what is valuable…your market does. So get out there and figure out what they want, then deliver an offer they’ll like and be willing to pay for at a price that seems a fair price for the offer being made, according to the customer.
Take homes:
You aren’t your customer. So you have to get to know them.
Strategy before tactics.
Brand management is the process of managing your Brand.
2. The Road to Recovery: Concert ticket prices jump, a lot:
Don’t believe me, look at the situation that Bruce Springsteen dealt with.
Inflationary pressures are real.
Get while the getting is good, yeah?!
We’ve covered this a great deal lately. So I won’t belabor any of this today.
Instead, I’ll just point out a few things:
First, as the situation around Bruce Springsteen proves again: people will find something to complain about. Just give them a moment.
Second, the inflationary pressures, spending limits, and lack of time are still real. There are just too many folks with too limited time, too many tickets, and too little money to sell out everything or even for everyone to make money. So you have to be careful in choosing markets, tours, or events because some markets are saturated, and won’t be able to buy tickets.
This might mean tours start hitting some mid-tier or lesser served markets again as they did in the 80s and 90s like Binghamton, NY, or Tacoma, WA.
Third, if you are going to go on sale with a show and you are waiting to figure out how to time the market.
You can’t time the market.
So you should leap as soon as you can reasonably justify it or with haste because to me, I would get while the getting is good.
3. How To: Segment a Market:
Big Ideas:
You aren’t your customer.
Behavioral segmentation…duh!
Your customers aren’t just “your” customers.
I’ve mentioned here before that for my money Roger L. Martin is the best strategy teacher in the world.
So seeing him enter the chat around market segmentation is a great opportunity to share Roger’s writing and to revisit a topic that I know needs more attention, especially right now.
How can I be so confident?
Because I’ve been working on segmentation with folks around the world and almost everyone has come back with a look of surprise at how revisiting their markets has helped them identify new opportunities.
Let’s do a quick primer on doing a good market segmentation this morning, shall we?
First, when you segment, you want to capture the whole addressable market. You start with everyone, not just the people you think are in the market.
This happens a lot and it is why opportunities are missed. It is also why personas are dangerous, you draw too many conclusions with too little critical thinking.
Second, you want to segment the market based on behavior.
Not demographics. Not color. Not some other knucklehead ideas that I’ve seen thrown around. A good marketer segments the market based on behavior.
How do you do that?
You can use a tool like the one I use, the meaningful actionable grid.
Third, slice up the market.
Again, behavior-based. Segments should be unique and a group of customers shouldn’t be able to exist in two segments. If they can, go back and start again. Just know, this doesn’t mean we are excluding folks, there is always spillover from one segment to the next.
That’s the top-level stuff.
I take people through a much more complex practice, but if you start here, you can achieve a lot.
Doing this stuff is important for two big reasons.
Number one, you aren’t your customer.
A proper segmentation forces you to get out of your head, thinking you are going to tell the customer what they want, and into the customer’s mind where you can see what they value and want.
Assuming you are just like your customers is wrong and dangerous because you can’t be. Once you start working on a product or service, you are too close to the situation to be objective. You know too much. You care too deeply.
So, you have to drill it into your head constantly, I’m not the customer.
Number two, the people that buy from you, no matter if you sell baseball, opera, theatre, primary tickets, or secondary tickets…they aren’t your customers alone.
Part of the process of doing a segmentation is that you get a better understanding of what you are competing against when they are thinking about buying a ticket. This can help you compete more competently for their attention in your marketing and their money with your products.
It is as simple as that because I often find that people don’t know who or what they are competing against. Plus, they assume a lot more loyalty than often exists and this causes them to take the second sale for granted.
Take aways:
You aren’t your market so stop trying to think that way. Do the work.
Your customer is a lot of folks customer. So you need to always keep in mind that you are constantly winning their business.
Segmentation is something everyone needs to revisit right now. There are missed opportunities, left and right.
4. Tech/Tools/Profile: Cover Genius buys Booking Protect:
Big Ideas:
Branding is magic.
Innovation can take many forms.
Never forget the people involved.
Congratulations to my friends at Booking Protect for their acquisition by Cover Genius. This will enable Booking Protect to reach even more customers and provide even more service opportunities for their partners and customers.
A few things of note since I’ve had such a long association with Simon, Cat, and Booking Protect, I’ll highlight some of the reasons that the Booking Protect brand continues to grow and will grow even further as the transition to being a Cover Genius company continues.
First, is the power of the brand.
The Booking Protect brand has stuck the landing on brand awareness. This means that people in the market know Booking Protect, not just the folks that are always at the conferences or obsessively reading every scrap of industry news, but the folks that might not make it to the conferences, that you might not regularly hear from, and that trickled through to the customer level on both sides of the equation: end users and direct partners.
Second, consistency.
Booking Protect as a business has been remarkably consistent in the way that they deliver their brand message in-person, online, and using partnerships.
Consistency counts.
Third, invest in your product, people, and platforms.
The Booking Protect technology has improved tremendously over the years. Simon, Cat, and the Booking Protect team have constantly worked to upgrade the product to provide a better experience for their platform partners, their venue-side partners, and the end customer.
The Booking Protect team is exceptional. I’ve rarely had the chance to work with people that I enjoyed being with as much as the Booking Protect team.
Platform expansion is the heart of insurtech businesses. The beauty of having a platform strategy is that Booking Protect was focused on seeing its product and service through the eyes of its customers so that they were able to anticipate needs, innovate regularly, and be ahead of the curve on giving partners the tools to be successful for their customers.
What do I anticipate for the future?
With the additional power of Cover Genius, there will be tremendous opportunities for further expansion in some of the markets we’ve discussed here over the last few months like Southeast Asia where the emerging middle class is starting to clamor for more entertainment options and the technology to support these initiatives is growing.
Cover Genius’s marketing power will enable the Booking Protect team to expand its position as the leading refund protection in the world of events and live entertainment.
Most importantly, the power of Cover Genius will enable Booking Protect to have the resources and capabilities to offer innovations, new solutions, and world-class services.
I’m beyond elated for Simon, Cat, and the Booking Protect team.
5. Blurbs and Such:
The French entertainment sector is prepared for a long recovery: Ain’t that the truth! Aren’t we all?!
Bob Lefsetz has a lot to say about Bruce Springsteen: Bob’s writing around the Bruce Springsteen on-sales is interesting to read if you start with his first post and go to the last one. Because you get to see his thoughts and he can muster more about it than I care to. I’ve seen Bruce twice and it’s a good show, but the most influential thing he did for me was Born in the USA. So I’m a fan, not a super fan.
StubHub announces a closing of their SF and Shanghi offices, laying off folks: I’m sure everyone knew this would be coming at some point. This happens in almost every merger because the acquiring company ends up with two sets in most roles and if the companies are integrated, a need for a lot less people. Plus, when you make an acquisition like this you have to show progress, paths to growth, and seriousness around costs. It sucks, but this is also the standard operating procedure for M&A deals.
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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.