Talking Tickets 31 December 2021: Happy New Year! Roll Tide! My Focus in 2022! Pricing Better! SportsBiz Jobs! And, More! Always More!
Happy New Year! #116
Hi!
Happy New Year!
Dropping this thing in the middle of the night in the USA is finally paying off since I can be one of the first to wish the world a happy new year!
I put out a piece on strategic planning for 2022 here. Spend some time with these 5 questions and let me know what y’all come up with.
To the tickets!
1. The Big Story: My 2021 Recap
Big Ideas:
The New Normal is already over. We are in ‘The Abnormal’ now.
Change is constant and despite the times, people still want to avoid it.
Less competition means less concern for customers!
Over the holiday season, I’ve been keeping these things short and tight. This week is no different.
I have an Alabama football game to watch this afternoon…you know I have to prep for that.
I took a few moments to write down some thoughts about 2021 and the lessons I’ve learned.
The 7 takeaways aren’t comprehensive.
I almost need to journal.
But after a lot of thinking and planning, 2021 did help me reframe what I want to do and focus on and how I can deliver value going forward.
So let me run down this list of 5 areas I’ll point my eye on in tickets, entertainment, and outside in 2022:
The importance of strategy and the utter lack of it in too many organizations.
Pricing as marketing’s MVP moment.
The importance of branding and the role your brand plays in your success or failure.
The challenge of driving demand in a changed environment.
Fighting commodification and tactification in our organizations.
Not a big story, per se.
But it is where my head is heading into the new year.
If y’all have some thoughts and ideas or some goals and agendas you’ve set for yourself or your business and you feel comfortable sharing them with me, I’d love to see them.
As always, thanks for being here. I appreciate you sharing your time with me each week.
2. The Road to Recovery: People have options and don’t seem to feel the need to “feel lucky” to work in sports:
Big Ideas:
“The Great Resignation” is just people rethinking their lives and careers.
If you want the best and brightest, you have to offer them opportunities, pay, and respect.
A lot of the justifications for poor hiring and HR practices are silly.
I talked with Dan Rossetti about this a few weeks ago.
The reality of the world is that people are not taking jobs with low pay, poor working conditions, or bad bosses like they used to.
To be fair, I was victim of some of this bad leadership, low pay, and poor working conditions when I was younger and that is one of the reasons that I found myself getting into the secondary market over time.
I could definitely do the job, but I didn’t feel like I needed to do the job for bad wages, in bad conditions, and for bosses that dumped on me.
That’s what is at play once again.
In 2022, I’m not sure what the recovery will really look like, but one thing I do hope for is that people get more respect, more pay, and better opportunities no matter where they find themselves in their careers.
3. How-To: Set better prices:
Big Ideas:
Setting better prices isn’t about guessing or “teaching”, it is about having a strategy and using pricing to deliver on that strategy.
Price setting is all about perceptions. Manage the perceptions and you can better set the prices, throw open the door to things like “once we get them in the door they will see the value” and you are likely to fail.
Lots of the best price decisions don’t really cost any more, you have to be smarter in your decision making process…that’s often it.
We will get to the pricing course in 2022.
But what I really want to highlight this week is the idea that pricing doesn’t need to be something that is shrouded in darkness, confusing, or scary.
You can do it.
This piece from a marketing publication highlights some of the ideas that will help y’all price better, play with perceptions, and generate higher profits.
For me, setting better prices comes down to a few ideas:
Price based on value. You find that out by understanding your market, doing research, and focusing on the value ladder.
Proper pricing demands research, quantitative, not qualitative, because it is easy for your market to game a qualitative survey.
Experimentation helps you make better pricing decisions. In my lifetime, I’ve made millions of individual pricing decisions. That experience has helped me know how to continue to make better ones.
Price is the most important lever you can push. When you goose your price by 1%, that typically boosts your profits by 10% or more.
Y’all know that discounts are for dummies, too!
May as well get the greatest hits in there today.
The key is to think about pricing like it is something you can control because it is.
4. Profile/Tech/Tools": Fanatics and the NFL are being sued over possible antitrust violations:
Big Ideas:
Consolidation of markets isn’t good for consumers.
Too much power in one organizations hands is going to have unintended consequences.
For this to really have any impact, the US would need to actually enforce antitrust law.
The next time I get an accurate package from Fanatics, will be the first time I get an accurate package from Fanatics.
Maybe over the years they’ve gotten better, but I stopped ordering from them years ago because I never got a complete, correct order and the quality of the products was often below average at best.
I bring that up because it highlights a lack of concern about the customer and the reality that the business seems to have one core competency: raising money to squeeze the market.
A lawsuit like this is probably interesting for a lot of people, but you shouldn’t expect too much because over the last 40 years we’ve seen very little, real antitrust enforcement in America.
What this story does highlight is the reality that American economy continues to consolidate more and more into fewer and fewer hands, meaning that consumer choice is often a fallacy.
The fallacy of choice often has unintended consequences for businesses and consumers.
This lawsuit is worth paying attention to because there is definitely a growing conversation about competition in markets, anticompetitive behaviors, and costs related to being a fan.
All of them are likely on display here.
5. Links and Blurbs:
Cleveland Boat Show is off due to the ‘Rona!: Does this mean that Ken and I will need to restart our Zoom Happy Hours soon?! Will there be lockdowns and more?! I’m guessing that we are going to be dealing with some turbulence for the next few months…for better or worse.
MLB’s antitrust exemption comes under pressure: A lot of antitrust action going on these days. I’ll keep an eye on this and turn to my resident antitrust expert at some point. But I think any impartial observer would say that this case could get interesting because the justification for a lot of antitrust inaction has been under siege the last year.
The shirt sales myth lives on: If we just sign some player, they’ll pay for themselves in shirt sales…it isn’t really that way. This piece explains how it works.
Emma Raducanu could be the first tennis billionaire: I’ll just say that I nailed this one early on when I laid out some of the ways she’d be able to take advantage of her US Open victory. The challenge for Emma is that there will be undue pressure for her to always be the player she was at the US Open even though she’s just starting to really grow into her game.
Lona Price Jones has a good thread on advertising and partnerships: We see some MLB, Marcus Rashford, and more.
Omicron hits Broadway at the wrong time: But the theatre can still transport us.
You can find me everywhere with my special Linktree! It is all my links!
Check out my friends at Booking Protect! Customers have been taking up refund protection at a rate that is double what it was before the pandemic began. This is a great opportunity for you to offer more value to your customers in a way that they want while also creating a new revenue stream for your organization.
Also, you’ll be able to see me and the Booking Protect team at INTIX in Orlando. I’m going to try and do some podcasting from the booth and we will have a grand time. Let me know if you’ll be there.
New Year, New Job?! Work at Fenway Park: