Talking Tickets 4 December 2020: Sales Data! The Secondary Market! UK Ticket Agencies! Audience Development! And, More!
Year 2 Episode 12
Hey There!
December is here! Finally, we are heading into the home stretch of 2020.
What have you learned this year? Doesn’t have to be about tickets or the entertainment industry but share some stuff with me that you’ve learned this year.
I’ve learned a lot and I’ll be posting some ideas and thoughts on my blog throughout the month about sports business, tickets, the arts, and more.
Join me, Ken, and Matt for Happy Hour tonight.
Remember, if you need someone to chat with, let me know…I’m here for y’all.
If you are a fan of the newsletter, please share it.
To the tickets!
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I’ve never bought into the hypothesis that things were going to snap back stronger than ever and that there would be so much pent up demand that it would be unlike anything we’ve ever seen before model of thinking.
Why?
A few reasons.
First, we didn’t have any relevant data to show us what consumers were likely to do one way or the other. We haven’t seen anything like this situation in about 100 years.
Second, the trends that were already evident in the economy before the pandemic like lower real attendance across sports and the number of regional theaters and venues struggling if they didn’t have a hit production of Hamilton or one of the other prime shows that could prop up demand for a time.
Third, let’s call it professional contrarianism and the idea that if everyone is going one direction, I’m going to be cautious there because of the Peter Drucker idea that “everything everyone knows is often wrong.” So before I dive in, I verify and test the hypothesis.
Now that in some parts of the world, tickets have been for sale for a little bit of time and we are getting some sales data, I can point you to some actual, relevant data to help us understand what the return of ticket sales is likely to mean for folks and demand.
The article has charts and data, but I’ll point to just one point:
If you have tickets for sale for the near term, folks are buying. If you have tickets for the distant future, people are buying. In the murky middle, people aren’t buying.
What does this mean?
It highlights one of the core ideas that drives most Western economies, the idea of consumer confidence as a driver of economic activity.
So we are seeing that where people can buy tickets now and are confident that they are going to be able to go, they are buying them.
In the future when folks are confident a vaccine will be available and people will be using it, they are also buying.
It is this middle zone that is a struggle and you can deal with that.
Here are three ideas:
First, make sure you communicate that tickets are on-sale and that you have a plan in place if there are disruptions.
You may do refunds and exchanges. You may have fall back dates. You may offer refund protection.
Second, you probably want to give some thought to the lead time on your sales. That’s a big lesson from Activity Stream’s data. Either put them on sale at the very last minute or put them on sale with tons of time. Don’t get trapped in some sort of middle area that makes folks “iffy” on the transaction.
Third, test.
Duh!
Right now, everything should be an ongoing test of messaging, audience development, marketing, sales, and delivery.
This can be unsettling because we don’t know what the results of any of our efforts are going to be right now, but you need to be comfortable with the testing process.
2. Recovery will also mean changing:
I’ve been preaching about a lot of this stuff for years.
I don’t feel the need to beat this one to death this morning because the idea of reconnecting your teams to the community should be obvious. The idea that getting fans into your team and sport earlier is something I talked about last week. Adapting to the changing consumer tastes is obvious…and it will actually be something I talk about at next week’s NSF when I do my presentation on STP.
One point with this piece that I feel like I can’t make often enough is that anyone in the business of marketing and selling tickets to live events or just needs folks to come into their businesses needs to have a lesson on “Market Orientation” and put it into practice in their business.
What is market orientation?
It is simply looking at your business from the point of view of your fans and customers, outside-in, not inside-out.
Why does this matter?
First, businesses that are market oriented achieve a lot of really cool outcomes:
Product launches tend to be more successful.
These organizations tend to be closer to their market and better prepared to offer unique value.
They typically generate higher profits due to all of this.
There are competing orientations like product oriented, sales oriented, and advertising oriented.
A simple working definition is product oriented businesses make a product and try to figure out a way to sell it and an audience to sell it to afterwards.
Sales oriented businesses look at their business and say all sales are good sales, even if the sale is a bad sale.
Advertising oriented businesses just throw out a message and don’t worry about whether it reflects something that the business can or will live up to. They just want to make sure they get the word out.
Going forward, the view is going to have to turn back to the fan and building relationships with fans. Focusing on value and recognizing that the lifetime fan value is a measure of success that should get a lot more attention.
Next week I’m going to roll out 4 FREE webinars for the rest of the year focusing on strategy, sales, marketing, and goal setting. You can vote for the topic here, but I’m hoping that y’all are interested in something around marketing so I have a chance to teach this to y’all in more debt.
I wrote up a few thoughts on this earlier in the week from the standpoint of testing the assumptions we might be making about what the state of the industry will look like when fans can come back in mass.
Dr. Fauci says that by the end of the summer of 2021, we could see full stadiums!
La Liga is ramping up their plans for the World Cups in 2022 and 2026 by partnering with Stagefront Tickets to help better understand the American market, gain insights, and improve the fans experience with the sport of soccer.
If I’m putting this in the context of tickets, we are at the intermission of dealing with the pandemic; halftime; or, somewhere around the top of the 6th inning. Pick your own metaphor here.
What this does signal is that the businesses that have been able to ride out the pandemic in less than hanging on by the edges of their finger nails are itchy and hoping that 2021 is going to be a different business environment.
It is tough to say what will happen next year yet, but it will take creative ideas and solutions to ensure that people get back to work, events are put on, and the world recovers from the pandemic.
What I’m pretty confident in is that the pandemic has accelerated some of the big issues that businesses in the sports and live entertainment space were dealing with anyway.
You see this in the ways that refunds were so difficult to manage due to lack of cash on hand. You have seen this in the amount of debt that businesses had before the pandemic and how much they’ve loaded up.
The only one we are still waiting on seeing play out is what will demand look like when things return.
In a lot of places, the demand issue was already sliding in the wrong direction. And, if this trend continues…not great!
4. Improv skills are good skills in the arts, sports, and decision making:
If you don’t know Holly Mulcahy’s work, check her out. She’s a great musician and she has come up with some really great ideas about how to better position the performing arts and orchestras over the years.
So when she starts talking about an idea for marketing and sharing the arts, I pay attention because she usually has something pretty cool to add to the conversation.
This week, she wrote up how she has been using improv skills to improve the way that she connects and communicates with her audiences and the people she works with.
I’ve become aware of the idea of “Yes, and” over the last few years and I try to use that whenever possible in my own work.
Why?
Like Holly says in her piece, we often aren’t really listening or we are listening only to figure out how to respond.
Heading through the pandemic and heading to the other side, the same old ideas aren’t going to just snap back into place and like magic everything will be great!
There are going to need to be a lot of “Yes, and” conversations.
5. In the UK, ticketing agencies have come together to create a 10-point plan for fans to return:
One of the keys to getting folks back into stands once it is safe to have larger groups return will be communication.
We’ve seen that in New Zealand, Australia, China, Germany, and other countries that have had large scale events up to this point.
Besides the book that the German’s shared this is the best guideline that people can grab ahold of and adapt to their own situation.
What’s nice is that this is also an effort that many organizations pulled together to create.
The other thing here is that it is applicable no matter what industry you are in or where in the world you are.
So a really good document to keep an eye on.
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What am I up to?
I’m in DC this week! That’s a broken record but still true!
Get on the podcast stream. I’m going to post a conversation with Evan Samet later today and I’ve got a few conversations scheduled including a new one with Sean Kelly because he’s been studying pricing models in streaming shows.
Visit my website at www.davewakeman.com
Check out my friends at We Will Recover, Activity Stream, and Booking Protect.
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