Talking Tickets 9 April 2021: Santa Anita Discounts On Day 2 of Re-Opening! Kimmel Center Charges A Membership Fee! More! More! More!
Episode 79
Hey There!
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The first story is trying to give me a stroke after I just got fully vaccinated with my second Moderna shot!
Let me tell you the second dose of the Moderna hits hard. A live look in on me on Wednesday would have been like:
I’m much better today.
Come have a drink with us this afternoon at 5 PM EST!
Check out our Slack Channel!
BTW, I have a friend in the UK that is looking to hire two important roles:
Chief Commercial Officer
Marketing Manager
Maybe if I could get UK residency, I’d take the CCO role. But if you are in the UK and you are looking for the opportunity to manage an iconic brand, want to work in a ball sport that will enable you to use the tools and point of view of a technology company to grow a sports business, let me know and I will brief you on what is going on.
To the Tickets!
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1. California starts letting folks back into live events and discounts follow! Immediately!
Key Ideas:
Discounts destroy! If you are discounting right away, that is trouble.
Position yourself about what you do well or against your competition.
Strategy is about power and dependency.
This is troubling!
Discounts are the single most destructive thing you can do to your brand and after your venue has been closed for a year…you reintroduce people to your offering with a discount?
Looking at the price points of the tickets, why even bother with the discount? There are probably 20 different ways I could come up with off the top of my head to rephrase or reshape the offer to add value to maintain price integrity and not discount.
I know I went into pricing a few times over the last few weeks and today I want to take it from a different angle so we don’t just rehash the pricing discussion.
But…
First, you need to get your pricing right. If you are coming out of the gate with a discount, that tells me you haven’t spent enough time on marketing and strategy during the this downtime.
Second, discounts are a failure of strategy.
If you’ve had any formal training in strategy, you might know that all strategies are about two ideas:
Power
Dependency
You want to create power for your business and lessen the power of your suppliers, partners, and customers. You want to be essential while any one person, group, or business isn’t all-powerful to you.
The other side of this is dependency and how you control the relationship.
In looking at this example, the Los Angeles area is obviously packed with things to do. So the likelihood of power and dependency off the bat is hard to achieve, but when you swing the whole situation back around to marketing…you come back to the holy trinity of marketing:
Segmentation
Targeting
Positioning
In the case of Santa Anita, a better approach here would have been to take a swing at a better positioning of your product.
We’ve talked about the role of positioning a few times and how you make one of two choices: about you or against your competition.
In looking at the competitive set competing against the track right now, positioning against things might look like:
Why eat at another sidewalk cafe when you can eat here?
Being alone together never looked so good. (With a view of the mountains.)
On the other side, positioning about you could include something like:
They’ve missed you too. (With pictures of the horses racing.)
You could highlight the betting windows, food and drink, or something else.
As you get rolling again, you need to put some thought into your strategy and your pricing.
Remember, discounts destroy your brand. When you discount 1%, you lose 40% of your profit.
Strategy is about power and dependence. Your strategy has to be about giving you control in the relationship.
Right now, before it is too late, jump back into your strategy and make sure you have a clear idea about the holy trinity.
The recovery of your business depends on it.
2. In the after times, folks are going to have to rethink their value:
Big Ideas:
Rethinking your value requires you to be market focused. Market focus requires research.
Revisiting your strategy should be at the top of your list of things-to-do as we re-open if you haven’t already done that.
The Value Ladder should be your best friend as you think about how to create demand for your products in a post-pandemic world.
The guy that wrote this piece is a smart guy!
😀
Sure, I wrote this and it is my greatest hits collection, but the other thing is the topic of corporate buyers and their tickets is a timely topic that we’ve covered several times in the last few weeks.
The pandemic should have made you rethink where your business sits in the market, how you make money, and how you develop demand for your product.
I had a chance to chat with Lisa Walker this week on my podcast and she mentioned an idea that she tries to convey to their partners about demand generation. Lisa’s view is that demand generation really has to be at the heart of a team’s core competencies.
I agree.
I’m not sure how many times I’ve mentioned this, but I flinch every time someone tells me, “Demand will snap back like nothing happened.”
Why?
A couple of reasons:
The assumption that consumer habits don’t change.
The belief that demand is like magic and just happens.
The feeling that demand is just owed to live sports and events.
None of this is true.
Consumer habits can change, will have changed due to the pandemic, and we won’t really know what that means until months down the road.
This means we have to be focused on our customers, engaged with them, and willing to swiftly alter our business practices to meet their needs.
Demand can be generated by outside forces like a specific matchup or situation. If I were you, I wouldn’t bet my job on those forces coming through consistently.
The real goal of recovery from the pandemic will require folks to focus on demand generation.
It is entirely logical that people are going to want to take holidays, go out to eat, and get together with people as pandemic restrictions end.
That doesn’t mean that any one event or organization is entitled to these expenditures.
As I laid out in the article above, this means getting in touch with your strategy.
To review, my approach to strategy is pretty structured:
Research
Segment
Target
Position
Funnels
Objectives
The Marketing Mix
We’ve gone over this ground enough lately, but I want to add one fun idea to the mix today to give you some more to think about. That idea is the Value Ladder.
The Value Ladder is a simple concept that helps you better position your product or service up from the bottom rung of the product to the top level of emotional connection.
My belief is that no product should be a commodity.
No matter what you are marketing or selling, you should always have the ability to add value and position your business as something other than a commodity.
Full stop!
Coming through the pandemic, this is an idea we have to get comfortable talking about and using. I’ve surfed so many premium sites to write the ALSD piece that I know a lot of folks need to sit with the value ladder for a bit because y’all are leaving money on the table because they haven’t spent enough time pushing their products and services up the value ladder.
Action items here are straightforward:
Start by reading through my explanation of the Value Ladder concept. Where are you typically putting your products and services in your marketing efforts? Don’t assume the customer knows where they should be, you have to spell it out.
Make a plan to do some research. Research has been a theme all year. Let me tell you why.
As a trained marketer, my general understanding of any situation is that I don’t know a thing until I do some research, but I do know how to do research and find answers. Don’t wing it!
Go do the research. It isn’t as hard as you might think it is.
Back to my conversation with Lisa Walker this week, we cover a customer survey they did early in the pandemic.
The foundation of their survey was Net Promoter Score.
Net Promoter Score is a simple metric that can teach you how your customers feel about you.
You should be familiar with it since I’ve been running surveys in this newsletter for the last year to make sure I continue to deliver value to you each week and with all the other stuff I do.
I ask 3 questions when I do it:
How likely are you to recommend the newsletter?
Why?
Can I follow up?
My score the last time was 67, up from 53 at the end of 2020!
Eventellect’s was 77! That’s up there with Starbucks’ level of customer satisfaction.
These three questions allow you to have a good numeric measure, some good quant data, and some good qual data. All while you’ve opened the door to ask folks for more information, keeping the connection to your market wide open.
It ain’t hard!
If you are interested in learning more, I’ve worked with Eventellect to create a worksheet based on our use of the NPS survey to share with my audience and as an added bonus, we are throwing in a free 30 minute consultation to the first 3 people that respond to help you put the survey together, analyze the results, or take action due to what you’ve learned.
No strings!
Just another way that we can encourage folks to use research effectively!
Do some strategy! Now that I’m vaccinated, I can’t wait to get out into the world to do more Whiteboard Workshops with folks in person. But do some formalized strategy work on your business. It is essential, you have to know where you are going and how you are going to get there to be successful.
3. Is now the right time to introduce a “membership” fee?
Key Ideas:
If you are basing your product development on old data, you might want to hit pause.
Product creation comes after strategy. And, strategy is driven by research.
Market Orientation is the most essential idea you can put to work for your organization right now.
I drove to Philadelphia about 2 or 3 weeks ago for the day to buy a bunch of cheesesteaks so we could do a tasting.
Really. Everyone picked Pat’s over Geno’s at my house.
This is what the late stages of the winter looked like, my lady and the boy sending me off on random trips to break the monotony.
While I was in Philly, I passed the Kimmel Center. Beautiful building, great city, and cool mission.
So I read this article with a bit of trepidation.
Why?
Organizations are hurting after a year or so of being without audiences.
Many organizations are in the position that the Kimmel Center finds itself where their revenues were tied too tightly to one revenue stream and the pandemic put them in a bind.
I’m going to use this story as a bouncing-off point instead of a conversation about the Kimmel Center.
A membership is a product.
And, I guess if this week’s newsletter has a theme it is strategy.
When you are putting together products now, you have to be careful that you do the strategy work before you get to the product.
Why?
There are a number of reasons.
First, you need to be Market Oriented. Again, you have to get the voice of the customer into your organization.
The next step is the need to do research. We’ve covered these ideas before: ethnography, qual, and quant.
Finally, you need to do the work of marketing strategy: STP!
What does this have to do with memberships?
Your research should tell you a great deal of information about the market.
From this research you should be able to segment the market based on behavior.
I use a tool called the Meaningful/Actionable Grid to create segments from research with my clients.
The key idea in my segmentation work is that you segment based on behavior, nothing else.
Demographic segmentation is stupid!
I’ve said what I said.
In theory, the rapper Machine Gun Kelly and Prince George are both Gen Z. If I segment based on this what I have I learned?
That I need a new job because I’m not good at what I’m doing!
I want to go deeper since the idea of demographic segmentation is so difficult to get people off of…much like the idea of discounts.
I did the math a few weeks back and at this point, I’ve worked on hundreds of marketing strategies and campaigns making “Old Wise One” when it comes to marketing strategy.
In all of the time that I’ve been working on marketing projects with people in politics, tickets, B2B, B2C, non-profits, professional services, and wherever else…I have seen age play out as a meaningless segmentation method in almost every case.
Not 100% because you can get lucky or you can stumble into a situation where age was a meaningful or actionable variable, but the bulk of the time…no dice.
I’ve been taking a few people through the process of creating new market segmentation maps using a tool called the Meaningful/Actionable Grid. There are 12 steps and it is uncanny how well it helps folks segment their market.
The first step requires you to list all of the possible variables in your market’s decision making process.
Jot them all down.
That’s the first step.
One of the ones I’m working on, the folks put together a list of over 60 potential variables that would impact their market’s buying behavior. Age and vertical were the two variables that were going to be the most important when we started.
As we’ve been working through the process, age and vertical were eliminated after the 4th or 5th step.
This gets back to the product formulation because if you’ve segmented based on behavior, you should be able to find some nice juicy targets of opportunity, and positioning becomes much easier.
All this is done because it makes creating products simpler and more profitable.
In looking at the Kimmel Center’s membership program, their ambition here is to raise $440,000.
Not to brag, okay, to brag a little bit. Two years ago when I ran the fundraiser for my son’s public elementary school, we raised over $250,000.
Humble brag, sure.
But the bigger point is that the money you are trying to raise isn’t that huge in the context of your organization. Or, it shouldn’t be.
The challenge here is the same challenge a lot of colleges are running into where the tax laws have changed and don’t allow folks to write off their seats as donations.
People are just not doing it, walking away, and then the tickets aren’t moving or they are moving without the donation attached.
To repeat my mantra, by doing the work of proper marketing you become closer to your market, you understand their needs, and you become better at launching profitable products and services.
Having Hamilton come through your venue is a great opportunity to open the theatre to an entirely new audience. For that matter, looking at the BO receipts before the pandemic, Dear Evan Hanson was a hit as well.
Is Hamilton going to carry the hopes and dreams of venues around the country the same way it did before the pandemic?
Honestly, we don’t know.
That’s why we have to step back, diagnose the situation around us, do some research, and formulate a strategy that is built on reality now….not how things used to be.
Takeaways here:
Product development is important but requires the dirty work of strategy to get right.
You have to revisit your strategy now. Your pre-pandemic ideas and research likely aren’t going to hold.
STP! STP! STP!
4. Festivals in 2021 will go on, but may look different:
Key Ideas:
Now, more than ever, focus on the market.
Research is your friend, knowing that real behavioral patterns may take a few months to emerge.
Your communications plan is great, but just running out a bunch of communications isn’t marketing. You have to make sure the communications plan fits into the marketing strategy and helps you achieve your goals.
I got a DM on LinkedIn from a connection that just said, “I got my shots and my tickets to see Pearl Jam in Dana Point!”
My audience knows me!
I’m more inclined to go to the Sea Hear Now Festival in Asbury Park, NJ!
Okay, maybe I’ll go to both!
As the march towards more events continues, we have to keep an eye on things slipping and ups and downs.
In June, all UK restrictions are set to be relaxed.
In the United States, as Lisa Walker shared with me this week on The Business of Fun, we are likely to see state-by-state restrictions relax at various speeds depending on case rate, vaccine rates, and leadership in each state.
We may or may not see vaccine passports. International travel is likely to be limited for the next few months or even years until we hit global herd immunity. And, we don’t know about psychological, economic, or health impacts that could cause our re-opening efforts to stop short of a full-on recovery.
To me this highlights a few important points:
The need to be market focused right now. The rush to get everything back to “normal” can overwhelm good sense and set you up for failure. The challenge is to balance pessimism and optimism so that you can work to create something that fans will come back to and also gives you room to operate if some negative event happens.
Research. Again, back to my conversation with Lisa Walker. We talked about what you can learn from old data, current data, and when your data will catch up and provide you some real insights. My opinion from hundreds of marketing campaigns is that you need to always be in the market and you have to have the humility to recognize that you often don’t know anything until you talk with your audience.
Communications will be ever more important. I caution y’all here that communications is really only around 10% of the game here. If you don’t have all the other pieces of a solid marketing plan in place communications will keep you busy but it won’t lead you to be effective. In thinking through communications now, you need to spend some time going through your entire marketing plan and figuring out how your communications plan is going to deliver on the strategy and plan you’ve pulled together.
At the risk of going full broken record here, the actions are pretty simple:
Get into the market and talk to your customers. Ethnography where fans are actually attending events. Qualitative research with focus groups and conversations. Quantitative research with surveys of past attendees and potential new audiences. Just know the data you get now still might have a limited shelf life.
Make sure your strategy is in place. STP! Strategy with SMART Objectives, funnels! The Marketing Mix. Go through the whole thing.
Don’t fall into the tactification trap like thinking communications is the only job of marketing. Everything matters. Get it right.
5. A few random ideas to close out the week:
The Red Sox City Edition uniforms show us the power of research and positioning. Notice the part about not being for “traditionalists”. That’s good positioning.
The pandemic might change the business of soccer forever. This deserves the full Talking Tickets treatment, but I wanted to share the article straight away. This is about soccer but everyone needs to think through what their business will look like in the future.
Piracy costs big dollars! I went back through some research I did on a major sports organization about 3-4 years ago. And, this actually came up prominently during our research. The reasoning for the consumer was that the organization had made the fan feel like an ATM and because the events weren’t held at times that were conducive to the real fans…they felt no compunction to go online for bootleg streams. There’s a lesson here.
Greg Turner talks about the future of Chinese soccer. This is another one that deserves the full treatment because I have a companion piece about growing the sport in Australia as well. And, one that highlights the opportunity presented by having a North American World Cup. The key is that growth doesn’t happen by accident and that sometimes you have to take a step back to go forward.
Luv Seats is trying to create a third market. This might be a good new revenue stream for teams, a way to fill in the gaps if a crowd is leaving early, or something else entirely. But I like the experimentation.
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What am I up to?
Y’all saw the ALSD article…so check that out.
I got my second Moderna, so I’m just waiting out my two-week inoculation period now!
But I did go to the Orioles Opening Day game vs the Red Sox!
Check out the podcast stream! Great conversation with Lisa Walker and I have a bunch of new guests lined up like Kate Howard from Eventellect, Mark Herschberg about his new book, and HBSE CEO Scott O’Neill.
The Dave Wakeman website is a good resource! Ha! What else would I say?
Don’t forget to email me to get a copy of the NPS worksheet that I put together with Eventellect. And, have a chance to get a free coaching session with me!
I’m going to be doing the National Sports Forum in May, talking about pricing! You know that’s going to be worth it!
Check out what Booking Protect is up to. I chatted with Simon last week and he said the uptake on refund protection is dramatic where tickets are on sale now. The data tells the story that your customers want the peace of mind of refund protection as they make decisions about attending events. Check them out at BookingProtect.com
Visit my friends at Activity Stream. Martin has warned me that new features are on the way to help y’all make sense of your data coming out of the pandemic and to use that data to take real, profitable actions. I’m being a little coy here, but check them out. The Activity Stream platform is a really cool tool that can help you make more money!