Talking Tickets 30 April 2021: Eventellect Case Study! Demand Post-Pandemic! Vivid Seats Going Public! And, More!

Number 82...Boom!

Hey There!

A lot to get to this week!

I’m still working on my goal of gaining 1,000 new subscribers by the 4th of July. So if you dig the newsletter, share it with colleagues or friends, in your social networks, or your business Slack.

I was chatting to Simon Mabb a week or so ago about “opportunity”. As I was getting ready to write this opening, I came across an old Peter Drucker quote that talked about “Results are gained by exploiting opportunities, not solving problems.”

As I look at the stories I worked on this week, they all tie back to this idea without me even realizing it.

Opportunity shows up in several places:

• Demand patterns are an opportunity to rethink our customers.

• Eventellect’s use of NPS surveys to find out what their partners need is an opportunity.

• Vivid Seats going public is an opportunity to rethink your distribution model and your marketing mix.

My challenge to you as you read this week is to think not in terms of challenges, but in terms of opportunities.

Come have a drink with me and the Happy Hour gang tonight at 5 PM Eastern.

Join our Slack channel!

BTW, the boy’s soccer tournament? His team finished 3rd out of 25 teams in his division. He had 1 goal and 7 assists on the weekend.

To the tickets!

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1. Most US adults don’t intend to go to a live event in the near term:

Big Ideas:

• Early warning bells are ringing that demand may not be “coming back like nothing happened”. So act now!

• Marketing is a process. Here’s the most basic one I can give you.

• Don’t discount! Seriously!

An exercise for you to start the week:

• Take out a sheet of paper and list the 5 most brutal facts facing your business. If you are brave enough, send them to me and we can discuss them.

I bring that out of my back pocket at the start because this report is going to fly in the face of the “demand will just snap back like nothing happened” crowd that has used that justification to try and go back to business as usual.

The numbers listed here are LOW!

As with any research, you have to be careful about looking too hard at what people say they are going to do and spend more time focusing on their behaviors.

That’s what makes this report on MLB attendance so far interesting because it does two things for us:

• Highlights that people are going back!

• Highlights that there is still a lot of work to be done on strategy and creating demand.

My concern on this is that folks are going to take a “wait and see” approach. Or, wait for a “magic bullet”. Or some other cliche that I can pull out from my deep reservoir of cliches.

The thing about re-opening versus recovery is that we don’t really know how much people’s habits have changed, what new habits they’ve created, or how the pandemic has changed their tastes.

What we do have is a body of research that tells us it takes about 21 days to change a habit. After 60 days you’ve likely solidified that habit. In the case of what we are dealing with, we are talking about a year or more of not going to events, maybe or maybe not watching on TV, and doing different things.

That’s a significant pattern change and you won’t interrupt that by just hoping, waiting, or assuming.

This points us directly to the need to get our strategy in order ASAP.

How?

As always, we begin with research. This is a good piece of secondary research to start you off with. As I’ve talked about before, I like to follow a path called Backward Market Research to help me define what I want to know and get my research focused from the start.

Follow the process of STP!

Segmentation!

Targeting!

Positioning!

I was taught to think of this process as a train track. You can go forward and backward. The key is to get each step right before you move forward and if you don’t have it right to be comfortable with rewinding and taking a step back.

Do your research!

Segment your market based on behavior.

Super important to not get confused by all of these other segmentation methods like demographics, zip codes, or whatever. They are all BS!

Use a meaningful/actionable exercise to do a proper segmentation.

Don’t believe me?

Do some targeting. Pick one or two juicy segments that you can compete for.

Position your business effectively in one of two ways:

• About your business.

• Against your competition.

A great position often draws both distinctions, but start by knowing which one you want to choose.

From this, you are going to want to build a strategy with SMART objectives and funnels for each of the products and services you sell and provide.

Each funnel should be unique and based on your research.

Specificity for the win.

Then, you close up shop by focusing on your marketing mix:

• Product

• Price

• Place

• Promotion

A few notes here:

• Don’t predetermine the tools you are going to use in promotion. Be media neutral and let your research guide you.

• Revisit your pricing in light of your market research and your SMART objectives.

• Think through your distribution strategy.

• Don’t discount.

So, seriously, get your strategy right sooner, not later.

Focus on research.

Follow the path of STP.

Set a strategy.

And, use that strategy to guide your marketing mix!

As an added bonus, for the “we don’t need any of this” naysayers, you absolutely do because your businesses require people to be physically present and there have been big shifts in populations during the pandemic and that is going to change behaviors, population mixes, and the shape of your market.

2. Eventellect’s success with NPS research points us towards the power of research:

Big Ideas:

• Research can transform your business. Start easy with researching your Net Promoter Score. Or, secondary data, if you must.

• Eventellect’s research allowed them to change their approach to value.

• Try using Backward Market Research and fight the tendency to look for confirmation bias.

The first story leads us into this case study from the week that focuses on what Eventellect learned doing some research on their customers.

I can’t emphasize this nearly enough, but if you do research regularly, it will transform how you see your business, how you deliver value, and your relationship with your customers.

In the case of Eventellect, they put together a comprehensive survey that gave them a great deal of new insight into their partners and where they create value.

One measure they tracked that caught my eye was the measure of their Net Promoter Score.

77!

This is an incredible number.

To put it into context, Apple’s is reported to be 72 and this newsletter comes in at 67.

As one data point, 77 is great. But you can boost your research by asking additional questions to get context around your NPS score.

In talking to their partners, Eventellect learned an entirely new way to approach how they deliver value including:

• Offering up more data-driven insights using their emphasis on “First Class Data”.

• The importance of aligning their business around their focus on shared outcomes with their partners.

• The value created by their emphasis on a concept they call “The Unified Single Game Theory”.

How can you use research to grow your own understanding of your market?

First, begin with doing your own research.

I’m working with a couple of organizations on the West Coast and Asia around complex market research now, but you can start much more simply by running with some research built around the Net Promoter Score.

I teamed up with Eventellect to create a worksheet to help you understand the number and do the survey yourself.

It comes down to three questions and you can put together a survey in under 30 minutes.

Two, ask the right questions.

I’ve simplified it with the Net Promoter Score survey, but you can expand the research if you want to.

In the case of Eventellect, they asked their partners the NPS question, but also dug deeper into contextual questions that allowed them to better understand the value the partners receive and where opportunities to deliver value were open to them.

As I discussed with Lisa Walker, one key idea was tightening up the way that insights were delivered so that an executive to gain something valuable from a piece of research in under 30 seconds.

TBF, learning about this from Lisa made me add the “Big Ideas” section at the top of each header.

Again, I’m going to talk about this twice this week but I work using a method called Backward Market Research that focuses on three steps:

• What question are you trying to answer?

• What’s the best way for this data to show up for you?

• Design your survey around those first two questions.

Ask the right questions to find out the right answer to the right challenge.

Finally, be careful to keep yourself from designing a survey or research that will just confirm your bias and assumptions.

Some of the best information you can gain from research comes in the form of data that goes against the assumptions you had made.

Research can be complex, no doubt.

But it can also be done pretty simply.

Let’s start with the simple stuff and we can always add more complex stuff later.

BTW, with NPS surveys…the real magic comes when you track the number regularly. In the first survey I ran in 2020, the newsletter received a 54. Very good, but 67 is better. And, if you see your NPS going up, you are likely to see growth in your business. In the time between surveys, the audience here grew around 12%.

3. Vivid Seats is going public via SPAC:

Big Ideas:

• A public company has different responsibilities than a private company.

• Before you make any decision about how to distribute your tickets, get your strategy right.

• Distribution needs even more attention than it needed before the pandemic.

SPACs are hot right now and I’m not a finance guy, but I do know a few folks that are in finance and their take on the topic mirrors this piece pretty closely.

My advice and thinking is that I’m going to be cautious with these things and look at each one on a case-by-case basis.

Then I’ll look and see if I can find an expert to walk us through the challenges and opportunities in SPACs on the podcast.

In the case of Vivid, my marketing mind goes right to the marketing mix. As I stated earlier:

• Product

• Price

• Place

• Promotion

Why?

As a public company, even if the beauty of the SPAC lies in being able to go public without the time, expense, and scrutiny of an IPO roadshow, once people are buying into a company’s stock, there are accountabilities.

Those are going to show up in the way that this impacts primary and secondary market sellers.

Let’s quickly walk through each of the pieces.

Product:

At the most basic level, you have the product you are selling whether it is a ticket or a suite or whatever.

Your job as a marketer/seller/executive is to understand how you want your products packaged, marketed, and sold.

A product really has three potential aspects:

• The actual product

• The core benefit

• The augmented product

Knowing that there will be new accountabilities for a public company, it pays for every stakeholder in the ticketing ecosystem to spend some time paying attention to whether or not the new goals and objectives that Vivid Seats will have to meet align with the way you want your product presented.

Does their strategy fit the way you want your actual product sold?

Does this new strategy sell your core benefit effectively?

What will the augmented product be like when you take into account the way that Vivid Seats markets and sells your products?

Price:

In my research, price is the most challenging thing folks are dealing with. It is one of the reasons I’m doing a session on pricing at the upcoming National Sports Forum in May.

One place where Vivid’s new responsibilities to public markets will show up is in the price of your product.

In this regard, you have to look at a minimum of three different locations when you think through pricing:

• The price the customer pays

• The fees that are charged to customers

• The fees that are charged to sellers

As I’m typing this, I realize you also have advertised prices and many others. But in thinking through this basic price setup, what story is your price telling your customers?

Remember, perception after the fact matters a great deal. “Was this worth what I paid for it?”

Fees can act as incentives to list or not list inventory.

There could be discounts used to encourage behavior.

At the tip-top, you have to think about the impact of price on your business and look at the decisions that a public Vivid Seats is going to make to help you manage this aspect of your business effectively.

Place:

In the before times, you’d hear folks go on and on about “distribution”.

There are two distribution buckets to keep in mind:

• Direct

• Indirect

Spoiler: Vivid Seats is indirect.

One thing I’ve been talking with my clients and partners about is being even more conscious about your distribution decisions.

Why?

Because you really want to control the experience that your customers have buying your product and where it is sold has a huge impact on the way that people view your product and its perceived value.

As a public company, how will this change the distribution of your tickets?

Will they be in more places? Less? Will the marketing mix that is used to sell your tickets change?

You have to keep all of these things in mind to really make the best decisions about the distribution of your product.

Just having a free-for-all around distribution may not be the best thing for you. Now more than ever, you have to be willing and able to make clear distribution decisions that help you achieve your goals.

Promotion:

Straight ahead, yeah?

The Promotion P encompasses sales, advertising, and any way that the word about your products gets out to your target market.

When you look at the promotions that are going on, you’re going to want to look at a bunch of areas like:

• Are they adding salespeople to try and drive more corporate sales or more partnership sales?

• How are the promotions being handled? Are there heavy discount codes being sent out? Incentives?

• Where are the promotions showing up? Are secondary sales cannibalizing direct sales?

The considerations that will go into dealing with a public company are a lot different than they are dealing with a private company. And, we have no way of truly understanding the unintended consequences of any decisions that need to be made or that are being made in the lead up to the SPAC taking Vivid public.

To go back to the beginning here, get your strategy right and from there you can look at Vivid, StubHub, Ticketmaster, or any other potential distribution partner through a lens of how do they help you achieve your goals.

You have to define success. Then you have to make sure you are managing your marketing mix to achieve your goals.

4. American Prodigy: A Cautionary Tale?:

Big Ideas:

• Research! Research! Research!

• Don’t be afraid to kill products. Too many prices and products can cut down sales.

• Keeping a brand fresh is a real challenge, but one that requires a lot of attention.

I’m totally into this series of podcasts. The first one was about Freddy Adu and whatever happened to the next Pele. Now Junior!

I love the Mariners, Junior, and the ballpark formerly known as Safeco Field.

When I lived in Seattle, I went to every Opening Day including seeing Ichiro get a game-winning hit in his first game. I used to love Thursday afternoon baseball in centerfield in my 20s with a cold African Amber.

And, I’ll never forget the All-Star Game where Cal Ripken switched places with A-Rod.

As much as this podcast is in my wheelhouse, it is also a cautionary tale. Specifically, this podcast and the story they are telling here is about brand management and product lifecycles.

Let’s consider three things this morning:

First, you have to constantly work at keeping your brand relevant.

On Monday, I released a conversation I had with 49ers Chief Marketing Officer, Alex Chang, where we had a chance to talk about the 49ers’ 75th anniversary and how the 49ers are focused on connecting their fans and their future to the history of the club.

This is a tough balancing act and it is something that folks often get wrong because it is so difficult.

In looking at the situation laid out in Junior’s story, at some point around 2004 we hit peak baseball.

I was at the Bloody Sock game and I still haven’t seen a run from the game…but I had a great time!

And, then somehow the brand became a little less vibrant and a little less connected to the culture.

The challenge now becomes dealing with that and refreshing the marketing and branding.

As a starting point, look at the work that the 49ers are doing right now because it does a great job of tying the past, present, and future together.

Second, no product is destined to last forever.

This is probably relevant to everyone because we still see a lot of emphasis on selling season tickets and packages that are pre-formed. (A solution to check out is LifeBlue and the work they’ve done with Dallas FC. Check out my talk with Nicki Purcell.)

We also get trapped in doing things the way they have always been done.

The thing I’ve learned over the years as a marketer is that there is a skill in creating products, but an even greater skill is in killing products that no longer are as valuable.

I’m not saying to kill season tickets or season memberships or anything, or not as a blanket statement.

Instead, I’m saying that we have to be cold-eyed when we look at our products and understand when it is time to create something new, kill something past its usefulness, or recreate something that needs new life.

This is why research matters so much.

I pointed to the work Eventellect did to discover new value from their research. I’ve highlighted some of the changes I’ve made here due to research I’ve conducted. And, I’ve been ranting on research a lot.

The big idea is that you need to do research and you need to do it regularly.

It doesn’t have to be huge surveys.

You can do some ethnography and watch how people are engaging with your events.

You can have some conversations with individuals, small groups, or focus groups.

And, you can do some large-scale surveys.

The key is that you need this research to help you properly track and manage your brand.

And, you need research to tell you what is and isn’t working with your products.

Without research, you are flying blind.

And, no competent marketer likes to do anything without some research.

What can you do now?

First, I’d start by doing some research.

Start small as I said above.

I know that MLB has been doing some research because I got one of their surveys in my Gmail a few months back. I also got a pretty extensive survey after I went to the Nationals game a week or so back.

Begin by understanding the market.

I’d strongly suggest you revisit the example of Backward Market Research I talk about above so that you can work to avoid confirmation bias.

Second, look at your brand and, if possible, do some brand tracking.

I laid out some simple places to start a week or two ago, but at a minimum, you want to know:

• How do people perceive you?

• Is your positioning coming through?

• Do you show up in your customer’s mind against your competitive set?

Third, revisit your product portfolio.

I cringe when I see 80+ different price points and 30+ different packages and all of these things.

Why?

Because the research is pretty clear on decision fatigue.

Decision fatigue is real and when people are overwhelmed with decisions, the quality of the decision goes down, and when it involves a purchase…the answer often becomes no.

Don’t be afraid to kill off products and price points. Think sales enablement and less friction in the purchase path.

5. The fallout continues from The Super League:

Let’s take another victory lap for me! I took one too by doing a double dip on Eric Fuller’s podcast this week. It is a bit long, but I hit all of the best stuff like marketing, modern sports sales, the Super League, and more!

I nailed my analysis of this one!

The fallout from this continues with protests at the Emirates, calls for board resignations, and Read Madrid President Florentino Perez still telling us that this is going forward while telling us that the “kids” need a shorter game.

While I’ve amused myself to no end, being asked to advise folks around the world about what is going on here…in my mind, this story boils down to the idea of brand management and the power of your brand.

In this case, I think it pays to look at three ideas in the context of the Super League misstep:

• Brands are much more resilient than we like to think they are.

• These teams are going to face some harm to their brands from the Super League, but it isn’t going to be permanent.

• Rebuilding their brand equity should be a goal, but even if they don’t focus on it the teams are assets that are so valuable that no amount of pressure is likely to push the owners to sell.

First, even after a rollout that will be studied in business schools, the brands of these Super League teams aren’t going to be destroyed.

Will they be hurt?

Maybe in the short term, but most brands have a lot of resiliency.

In other words, that one fatal mistake rarely happens.

Brands that falter and fail typically do so more by death by a thousand cuts.

The danger for the teams involved is that they follow the path that Real Madrid seems to be on where they don’t pull an about-face and are defiant in the face of tremendous backlash.

Why could this be the point of trouble?

Money.

If Real Madrid, Barcelona, and Juventus hold out and keep banging on about this for too long, sponsors could get frustrated and that could cost them money.

Other than that, I think that before too long this will be an afterthought.

As a primer, here’s a story on how La Liga TV rights are negotiated to give you a bit of insight into what makes Madrid and Barca different.

Second, there will be some short-term damage.

You don’t have to look any further than the way that Liverpool lost a sponsor, Amazon jumped out quickly to throw the 12 teams under the bus, and the way that ownership groups have had to offer up apologies that do have a bit of the feeling of being done against their will.

All of this is going to be short-term.

As an example, look at some classic examples of branding blunders that have been forgotten over time:

• The launch of New Coke.

• Uber’s challenges when founder Travis Kalinick went off on a rider in his car.

• Pepsi’s issues with their Kylie Jenner ad.

These have all been minor things in the overall brand arch.

In the long run, I am pretty sure the Super League will likely have a similar impact on most of the clubs involved.

Finally, rebuilding your brand equity should be a priority, but even if it isn’t I wouldn’t expect any pressure to get ownership groups to sell.

At the heart of this story is the possession European football fans feel for their game, their teams, and their history.

Another part of the story is how the ownership groups have taken over these clubs at a time of tremendous asset inflation.

When these two ideas met, it was a guarantee that there would be friction.

The severity of the fan backlash in England was surprising and the way that some clubs have kept up the intensity of their anger towards ownership is impressive.

Does that mean anything?

Not as much as we would like to believe.

These huge assets are likely not going to go anywhere.

But I do think we can learn a lesson about fans still having a voice in how their teams are run and presented. In many places, in-stadium attendance still represents about 40% of the revenue of the club…if not more.

If you are a fan, vote with your wallet.

Takeaways:

First, know that brands are tougher than a lot of marketing “gurus” like to give them credit for.

Be careful with messing with your brand, but it is unlikely that one bad step is going to destroy a brand.

It isn’t absolutely the case…but it is a good way to bet.

Second, there will be short-term harm and any lingering impact is likely to be attached to how fervently the remaining Spanish clubs and Juventus stick to the script that they have to do this, everyone else be damned.

How will this damage show up?

Money!

Third, the ownership groups aren’t going anywhere unless this scenario inspires someone to pay a crazy price for one of their teams. And, even then, I’m not sure I would expect much to happen.

That’s just me!

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I’m in DC this week, but NYC is re-opening on July 1st! I’ll also be in Boston on June 25th and 26th.

Check out the podcast! Alex Chang, CMO of the 49ers, was on this week.

Get to the website!

Hook up with my friends at Booking Protect! Folks are taking up refund protection at about twice the rate they did before the pandemic because they want security and peace of mind coming out of the pandemic.

Activate is the new tool from Activity Stream! It helps you boost your email marketing using data and AI. Knowing how to use your data now is going to carry extra importance because not all data is good data now.

I’ve teamed up with Eventellect to create an NPS worksheet. Get it free by emailing me. I’ve gone on and on about the importance of research and Eventellect has seen the power of research first hand. Let us teach you how to get started on your own research journey!