Talking Tickets 9 October 2020: Pearl Jam! Sports Business! BTS! And, More!
There's a theme here and it is look at your business model and revisit the Holy Trinity of Marketing: Segmentation, Targeting, and Positioning!
Hey There!
How are you holding up?
Crazy times and all!
Give me a shout to say “hello” or let me know what is going on.
No happy hour tonight due to the holiday, but know that you can always cheers me, Ken, and Matt!
I voted on Tuesday in DC where we have over 50 locations around the District where you can submit your mail-in ballots.
Simple and effective.
If you live in the United States, make sure you are registered and have a plan to vote. Check out the work of Emily White and the folks at www.ivotedconcerts.com
To the tickets!
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1. Pearl Jam drives tourism dollars!
I’ll always find a way to introduce Pearl Jam’s business model into the newsletter, so here it is!
This study provides a framework for us to think through getting our venues relaunched and to maximize our likelihood of success when the time comes to welcome folks back.
First, the important things.
Over the weekend of the Pearl Jam Home Shows in 2018, $58M in new hotel revenue, $9M in hotel taxes, and millions in spending in the local economy of Seattle was generated by the two Pearl Jam shows.
As an example, when I went to the Sunday night “Away” show in Boston in 2018, my approximate spend for 24 hours was likely somewhere between $1,000 and $2,000.
(Too many breweries, too many beers, too many souvenirs to put an exact dollar figure on this.)
Fenway holds approximately 40,000 folks for a concert and my plane from DC was packed with folks in Pearl Jam shirts and the plane back from Boston was packed with Pearl Jam shirts.
Take that for what you will. But I know that I met a group of 6 guys in Boston for the weekend.
Second, consider what this means for marketing and selling tickets in the future.
For one, if you can get Pearl Jam to play in your ballpark, you should.
The report says that this is likely the upper limit of the benefit you can see from an event.
This means that competition for the bands that will draw audiences from around the country or the world is going to be intense. Because I’m fairly certain from talking to people that these kinds of shows are what people are jonesing for the most.
Translation: costs here will be higher.
Second, looking at the data around the financial impact of a typical Mariners’ game on the local economy, it helps us see that we may want to rethink our marketing and sales process to provide a lift to games or less high profile events to help capture some of the same vibes.
I’ve been spending a lot of time on the Holy Trinity of marketing the last month or two: Segmentation, Targeting, and Positioning.
I know BIG DATA!
Our current situation provides a lot of opportunities to apply better thinking around data and how we should be using the tools of marketing to effectively drive revenue to our events.
For one, look at bundling.
Frederic Auoud and I spoke about this on our We Will Recover webinar back in the spring. Recognizing that games and other events are attractions for locals that don’t spend significant money in the city core provides a challenge, but also an opportunity.
Coming out of the pandemic, the opportunity exists for more stay-cations or destination events where safety and control are at the heart of the experience.
Again, opportunity.
Another thing, the pandemic is having an impact on our consumption patterns. Some of these impacts are present now like changes in TV consumption or grocery buying.
Will these be permanent?
It much too soon to know for sure.
What they do indicate is that we are seeing the value proposition of products and services change around us and the likelihood that we are going to re-enter an environment where there is a much different we should take the opportunity to shift our customer orientation and rethink our value proposition.
TV ratings were falling before the pandemic for a lot of sports and the ratings for the return of sports have only shown that trend continuing. Real turnstile attendance has fallen consistently over the last years. Right now, theatres, stadiums, and other venues can’t generate much if any revenue.
This should have alarm bells for change banging everywhere!
How do we attack this?
First, flip the lens on your business and ask what your guests are going to see when they see you. This is my definition of being market-oriented. Understand what your customers are seeing and looking for when they look at you, then work to give it to them.
Second, take a good hard look at the Holy Trinity of marketing: segmentation, targeting, and positioning.
A term I heard a lot when I was preparing a talk on change last year was “getting older and whiter” wasn’t a good strategy for the long-term stability of our business.
In thinking through the challenge of getting folks back to venues, ballparks, and stadiums, a similar phrase would be “the way we have always done things ain’t going to work any longer.”
So rethink the assumptions your business is built on and look at your customers.
Who are they?
What do they value?
What can you provide them?
I question how useful historical data is going to be when events return. We aren’t really going to know anything useful until the pandemic ends.
This effort out of the UK focuses on the arts and Indigo LTD was able to generate over 200,000 customer responses during the pandemic.
Check out the project and get involved if you are in the UK.
As I pointed out at the top, a lot of the data won’t give us accurate information until we get closer to the end of the pandemic.
But as venues are working through things in Europe now, watching how these cultural institutes deal with their unique situations is going to be helpful to venues all over the world.
There are more resources coming online that will enable y’all to start making plans for the future and getting yourself set up for success like all of these tools dropped by AudienceView this week.
3. Growth of sports business is predicted to slow:
This is built off of a report from PwC that looks at sports business each year in markets outside of the USA and there is a lot to get through in the report.
The headline is that sports business looks like it might slow down over the next few years.
We are seeing the real impact of the coronavirus show up and the numbers are brutal. FC Barcelona reported losing over $100 million in revenue this year, specifically attributed to the pandemic.
I’ve highlighted the challenges that the AFL, the NRL, the FA in England, and many other leagues and teams around the world are coping with right now.
Early in the pandemic, I mentioned how an executive I know mentioned that “if we are being honest with ourselves, we never really recovered after the financial crisis, but the numbers will tell you we did.”
That’s an interesting idea to hold in mind now.
If the business of sports does slow or even slip a bit, there will be severe implications.
I’ve been going on and on about business models lately, but here is another example of the need to rethink your business model and regain your focus.
If you are in a position where you think growth is slowing or sliding, here are some action steps to take right now.
Rethink what your fans and the market needs from you.
Do a little research into how folks are engaging with you and what the market for sports looks like.
Go through your segmenting, targeting, and positioning. These are things you should be looking at each year anyway.
Reset your goals and objectives now based on the reality of the situation you are dealing with.
After that, we can talk about taking action.
But really this is the time to get back to the basics of marketing strategy with focusing on the market’s needs, researching the market in the context of the changes brought on by the pandemic, revisiting your STP, and resetting your goals to deal with the world we exist in.
As we’ve discussed throughout this pandemic, we are dealing with a minimum of three significant crisis points:
Mental
Health
Financial
To expect that nothing is going to change and that you can go back to the way things were is ludicrous.
So my best bit of advice for everyone is to get your mind right and focus your attention on scenario planning. But not just for the best-case scenario. You also need to look at the likely scenario and the worst-case scenario. As we’ve seen throughout the pandemic, the best-case scenario has yet to make an appearance and the worst-case scenario has shown up far too often as the likeliest scenario.
4. NFL’s billions of reasons to have a season:
Every league and team is walking a tightrope to get games in so they can complete their seasons.
With huge TV rights’ deals and with ratings down on almost everything this year, sports can’t afford to not play games.
The bubble has worked, but how long can a bubble work for?
MLB’s bubble is up and operating even if I’m not sure how you have a bubble if you let fans into the bubble.
This will provide a test case for how safe it is to bring fans into games along with the spots we are seeing in college football, the NFL, and the few other events hosting fans right now.
Every story from here until everything returns to normal in 2021 or 2022 should have us asking ourselves a question about creating new lines of revenue, expanding the way we talk to our customers, and growing our audiences.
(A theme has developed, yet again, this week.)
We shouldn’t just assume that demand is going to snap back like “magic”.
We can’t allow ourselves to not focus on growing audience attention now when the costs of gaining folks attention is less than in normal times. Because the costs of advertising are lower, people are spending more time at home or not doing their normal activities. And, folks need a diversion from the crap that is playing out on the news constantly.
I’ve written a little bit about how well-executed some of the brand awareness work the NFL does with CBS is, but to focus on audience development right now, let’s look at two ideas:
Let’s look at the sales funnel we built before the pandemic. I’d say for most folks awareness is huge. We have an entire section of the TV news and the local newspaper dedicated to promoting teams and sports. But let’s figure out where we were losing people from buying from us or watching us and figure out if we can fix that now. By this I mean, what does your sales funnel look like, and where does the road lead? Do you know are you losing people during the consideration phase? The preference phase? Or, are they just not following through on a purchase? Figure it out!
Have a gander at your communications’ strategy and ask are you focusing on the right things, are you talking to the right audience, and are you hitting them in a way that is going to have an impact? Do this in partnership with your sales funnel because your communications should be used as a way to nurture and move people along the brand relationship with you. TV and radio work well at the top of the funnel to drive awareness. As you move down the funnel, you may want to think through adding things to the mix like a dedicated and consistent newsletter for your fans, some sort of gated site, or something else that deepens the relationship.
5. BTS and the BTS Army offer up a great case study for the future of entertainment:
I felt this is a good way to end the newsletter this week. It provides a nice bookend with the Pearl Jam story at the top.
The numbers for BTS are staggering.
29.2 M Twitter followers.
$4.9 B to South Korea’s GDP!
They are an industry to themselves.
Look at the root of this.
It is interesting and highlights a path that many of us should be talking about more and highlighting in our social media, in our calls to legislators, or in any forum where we need to advocate for relief of the arts and entertainment. Because the BTS phenomenon can be traced back to investments the government of South Korea made after the late-90s crash of their economy.
The way that BTS and their team use D2C and digital-first marketing to drive their audience and convert them is something that the entire world can learn from. (This is a concept that I talked about with Zoe Scaman on the podcast, but here’s a video of a talk she gave a few weeks back on fandoms.)
You see several things going on here that are essential to think about now and going forward:
Intense customer focus. The band allows their audience to have a great deal of ownership over the relationship with the band and the band and their teamwork tirelessly to give their audience value.
A strong brand. They make sure to never allow any one individual to undermine the brand of the whole.
Understanding of overlap and targeting. The band’s first all-English single was only released this year, but they have become the biggest band in the world without ever directly appealing to English speakers.
This is a message about the power of great marketing, of course. But it also shows us that despite being in a time of great uncertainty, there are many roadmaps to recovery and growth.
Like I want to remind people all the time, it isn’t going to be easy…but what fun would that be anyway?
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What am I up to?
Join me for The Seat Selling Sprint!
Check out the podcast. Colin Lewis is talking about career reinvention, the business of hospitality, and turning yourself into a T-shaped person.
I showed up on Eric Fuller’s podcast a few days ago and never shared it. So have fun with that one as well. I talk sports business, marketing, sales, customers, and revenue.
Go to the blog on my site.
I’ve got a new webinar coming out over at the We Will Recover site that should be posted in the next day or so. But keep an eye on what they are doing. This week they talked to my buddy, Sean Walsh, from the Boston Red Sox about how they are rethinking their business during the pandemic.
Visit my buddies at Booking Protect. It is customer service week and the team has put together some really great ideas about customer service and building relationships with your customers.
I’m around in the DMV. So if anyone wants to chat, let me know.
Also, if I’ve never mentioned this before, I do a newsletter on Sundays called ‘The Business of Value’ that focuses on marketing and strategy! You can sign up here!