Talking Tickets 8 April 2022:
#130
Hey!
I’m back…which seems pretty good to me these days.
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Let’s get to the tickets…!
1. The Big Story: Discounts don’t work!
Big Ideas:
The right question is often: “Why isn’t something working?” and “What can we do instead?”
This is really about Customer Orientation.
“We’ve always done it this way” is typically the kiss of death.
Tim Chambers shared this with me because he thought I would like it and he was right.
This piece from David Taylor hits right at a core idea of successful marketing: Customer Focus/Market Orientation/Inside Out Thinking.
All of those terms are just recognition that you have to look at your business through the eyes of your customer.
In too many cases, we see folks think that they “know” exactly what the market wants. All they have to do is sit down and put themselves in the shoes of the customer.
WRONG!
That’s a formula for failure because you are too close to the situation, you are working on the situation so you are over invested in the ins and outs, and you probably have a level of knowledge that the average person could never have about the event or show you are putting on.
All of this is Customer Orientation.
Why do organizations fight Customer Orientation so much?
I’ll give you three because three examples is enough to make a case on.
First, “We’ve always done things this way” is a powerful inhibitor of change.
No one ever asks if you have been doing the right things. They just note that you’ve been doing things this way, so it is acceptable.
Roger Martin talks about how consultancies have become really good at pushing this concept lately, limiting the impact of ideas from a broad spectrum of places, and enabling the kind of copy cat thinking that destroys businesses that should be doing better.
Second, people are afraid of not having the answers straight away.
Look, I’ve fallen into this trap as well at certain points. I’ve felt like I’ve had to have the right answer, right away. The truth is that good research and understanding your customers is an ongoing thing and it takes time.
Usually, a bit longer than you want.
The challenge is being comfortable saying that we have to follow the process and spend the time getting to know the customers we hope to serve.
Finally, people love to have rules of thumb or to have something to fall back on that has worked in other places.
There’s an old saying about “no one ever getting fired for hiring IBM.”
This holds true in the world of tickets and entertainment and it is why the cold call hasn’t died out even when it has become more and more difficult to get people to answer calls from numbers they don’t recognize.
It is also why people are reluctant to do market research and find out how their market has changed. You don’t have to come up with a new solution if you never have a new challenge to face…am I right?
Ultimately, this entire scenario is about trying to get to the right questions.
You don’t get to the right questions or the right framing if you are using the same old thinking.
You have to ask new and different questions.
Some helpful ones might be:
Why isn’t this working?
What would need to be true for this to work?
Is there some other solution that we haven’t tried?
What new information do we have that will change the way we think about this situation?
Knowing what we know now, how would we approach this situation if we were starting from scratch?
Those are just five questions that I pulled out of thin air. You can brainstorm your own list of questions.
The key point is that to be successful going forward, you need to know your customers.
Unfortunately, too many places don’t know their customers and their first reaction to slowing ticket sales, poor demand, or bad word of mouth is to offer another discount…because in the face of not knowing your customer and their wants, the easy assumption is that cheaper tickets will obviously be the solution and the customer will know how awesome everything is once they get that cheap ticket.
I guess this time will be different, or something…
2. The Road to Recovery: Jackpot is a book y’all should read to better understand the mad dash for gambling cash:
Big Ideas:
Rob Davies has written a book that should raise concerns everywhere that gambling is taking hold, especially around sports.
The old Mark Cuban idea that gambling will make people more interested in baseball seems to be likely BS like the adage that sex sells.
With widespread gambling coming out so quickly, it is important to look at the reaction in the UK after the 2005 Gambling Act came into place.
The one book I knew I needed to buy in the UK while I was there was Jackpot by Rob Davies from ‘The Guardian’.
I’ve been interested in gambling and the whole gaming industry since I was a younger man and was involved in nightclubs and events.
I don’t know what brought it on, but I found the whole situation interesting from a marketing and sales perspective. And, if you were to hit up 30 year old Dave, I’d have been likely to offer up the question of “why don’t we have more gambling and gaming available to people?”
47 year old Dave, has a much different perspective on it in all manners because I see the upside and the downside much more clearly now.
When I go to Vegas or Atlantic City, I love to make a sports book bet or play a little poker. I watched Spurs v. Man City from the SportsBook in Vegas on the opening weekend of the Premier League season and had a lot of fun.
So, I’m not anti-gambling, by any stretch.
What I do worry about is that the US has jumped into the gambling game so completely and so quickly that things haven’t really been thought about well enough to fight back against some of the worst case scenarios that seem likely to happen because all of the examples that Rob Davies list are already on display in the United States.
I’m alarmed when you see industries like sports that have been slow to innovate in a lot of ways for a decade or more, jump in so fully to gambling. This looks like a recipe for disaster to me.
One justification for gambling that doesn’t hold up to the lightest scrutiny is the idea that gaming will increase the popularity of live sports.
In marketing and advertising, there is an old adage that goes “sex sells”.
That is accurate with one caveat: sex sells sex.
Research shows that the use of sex in advertising is really good at selling sex, but does little or nothing to sell the product that is being associated with the sexual images. In fact, the sex drive is so strong that it overwhelms everything else.
The same seems to be true with gambling and sports betting.
The games don’t matter.
They are there for the gambling fix.
So, tying the hope that gambling to future growth in fandom for games or teams or sports seems like a fool’s errand because it is.
The final part for me is the most concerning because this book is about gambling in the UK and in the US we don’t have the same mental health and addiction infrastructure to help people that fall into gambling addiction or to hold the gaming industry to account when they use manipulation to drive higher rates of loss from gamblers or that act in ways that are likely to lead to higher rates of gambling addiction.
I mean, I’ll frame it in the context of another conversation we have that seems to have little resolution…if we can’t control social media and tech, how in the hell are we going to control gaming and gambling?
P.S. since I wrote the piece, two more interesting gambling related pieces have come my way:
3. How-To: Dickie V teaches us how to be more human:
Big Ideas:
Dickie V is sharing his cancer journey because he wants people to learn what this stuff is like.
He also can see the pain that dealing with the medical system is having on families and patients.
Ultimately, Dickie V is trying to raise money to help families in their toughest moments.
Last week, I taught y’all about my dealing with a “mild” COVID case and how that still set up some incredibly awful things in my body.
I did that so that y’all might learn what is going on with COVID from someone you know and trust and you’ll be less reluctant to ignore some minor symptom.
Dick Vitale is on a mission to share his cancer journey for similar, but different, reasons.
First, Dickie V wants to teach people.
Same, brother. Same.
I think there is still too much mystery around health and physical issues. We ignore them, don’t talk about them, or aren’t aware of the real impact of what is going on.
It is hard to have empathy in a situation that seems really foreign. That’s why authoritarians like Vladimir Putin try to use dehumanizing language against people like the Ukrainians…it helps make you less likely to be empathetic to them and side with the authoritarian.
Same goes for health issues.
You don’t understand something. You can’t find the words for it. You can’t begin to offer support or help.
Education is the key.
This isn’t just war. It is health, business, or life.
Second, the medical system can be brutal.
No one loves their health insurance.
In the States, the health care system is 17% of the economy.
Try telling me that the primary concern is patient care and service and I’ll sell you my bridge to Brooklyn.
By educating people about the battle against cancer, Dickie V is able to show you how tough families have it while their kids and loved ones are battling cancers and other diseases.
Even when you have a “Cadillac” plan, it can be pretty brutal to deal with your insurance company.
Finally, Dickie V is trying to raise cash money!
You know, money helps smooth things over.
I’ve been a long-time supporter of EB Research Partnership in NYC. The NATB has been a long-time supporter of the Ronald McDonald House. My wife supports the MS Foundation.
All of these organizations need money and they do a good job of getting it out in a way that has a positive impact on the world and the communities they support.
I highlight this stuff because I’ve dealt with the COVID battle after I was “recovered” and know how difficult it is. I also have been a supporter with my pro-bono work, my donations, and other support of a number of organizations that aim to relieve the suffering of folks that don’t have a lot or as many resources as I do.
And, Dickie V is putting his name and reputation behind the effort to help families battle cancer.
So…not exactly tickets, but people and people buy tickets!
4. Tech/Tools/Profile: Roma will use AI to make better ticketing decisions:
Big Ideas:
My readers are innovators!
5. Blurbs and Such:
Fuji Rocks welcomes back international acts: After two years, international acts are returning to touring around the world including Japan. This is a strong lineup and it will be interesting to see the number of tickets sold.
LPA’s report on 2019-2022 gives a look at the Australian market: The thing about data, it all happened in the past. But this is a good snapshot of two worlds: before COVID and during COVID. This is also pretty powerful because it shows you trends over a long period of time.
Football Australia has a struggle on its hands: The Socceroos are struggling, but if you are an American, you know what that is like. Getting ready to be a World Cup caliber team takes a few cycles and getting competitive can take even longer. This is in the form of a cartoon so its more amusing.
Quatar has sold 800,000 World Cup tickets already: That’s a lot of tickets already, but it will be interesting to see how many people are able to head to Quatar for the WC. Reports are that the footprint isn’t very large.
Commanders may have withheld ticket revenue from other teams: Combined with the allegations around impropriety of payments to throw games, there is a lot more bad news than normal floating around the NFL. Keep an eye on this stuff because of the brand implications…or, remember the old adage: How did the rich man lose all of his money? Slowly then all at once. The same thing could happen here though the NFL is insulated with their long-term media rights’ deals.
Martin Lindstrom has a take on data that is worth looking at: Martin Lindstrom wrote a book called Small Data that I found really compelling when it came out a few years ago. So this article flows right out of the writing in that book. The idea of small pieces of data showing you an entirely different world tracks with my own experience, but the use of data that Mark Ritson talks about is also foundational in my experience as helpful in defining the parameters of your marketing efforts. In thinking through this situation, I don’t think it is big data sets versus small data, but contextual data and a willingness to really grapple with data in small and large pieces to really figure out what the data says.
I was in Sportico with Simon Mabb a few weeks back talking about Booking Protect, refund protection, and what customers want and need now. Give it a read.
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Thanks again to the Ticketing Professionals Team. They’ve put together a great event and just announced the new event for 2023. See y’all in Birmingham!
I had my buddy, Simon Severino, back on the podcast this week. We talked about marketing, strategy, and long-term planning. Hit some of the previous episodes. All of the ones from 2022 have been bangers: Ruth Hartt, Hannah Grannemann, Lyndsey Jackson, and, now, MK Lever. I’ve got some more good stuff coming up!
Let me know who you’d like to hear from by sharing your ideas with me here.