Two Factors Drive Ticket Prices!
Number 184: 21 April 2023
Hi!
Did you enjoy yesterday’s webinar?
Happy Birthday to my G, Cormac. He turns 13 on Sunday and is on a tear on the pitch leading his team to a 6-0, 5-0 weekend last week with 2 goals and 6 assists.
The new travel director pulled him aside to tell him he looked forward to working with him individually on his agility and comfort on the ball in tighter situations.
Congratulations also to Tim Chambers for his “Outstanding Achievement Award” at Ticketing Business Forum.
Let me know.
I’m working up a few new ways to learn/work/connect with me.
Including doing another webinar
To the Tickets!
Obviously with announcement of Pearl Jam playing Chicago and Austin, I’ll be looking at doing some in-person workshops to justify my trips to those cities.
I kid.
I need no justification.
I. Tickets sell based on two factors:
Awareness
Perceived Value
This graph is something I’ve pulled out with a few clients recently.
You can make a lot of decisions on pricing, marketing, and positioning by knowing where you are on the graph.
Let me explain the labels for you really quickly:
High/High: “The World is Your Oyster”. You have strong brand awareness, brand associations, high perceived value. This is the Heatles, Hamilton on Broadway for years, or Pearl Jam at the Garden last year.
High Awareness/Low Perceived Value: “Value Brand”. This can be a plus or a minus, depending on what you are attempting to achieve with your offering. This is stuff you can think of as it “does a job” like store brands.
High Value/Low Awareness: “Growth potential”. You might be “a best kept secret.” You don’t want to get stuck here for too long.
Low/Low: Commodity. This is where too many tickets get stuck now. People might know a show is going on or a game happens in town, but they don’t know when or don’t care to look to see if they might want to go. Look at a lot of the pictures of empty baseball stadiums to start the season, that’s the situation here. If you are stuck here, you have to get out ASAP. You are about to hit a death spiral.
Where do you think your tickets and your business fall on this scale?
Bonus: You can influence both of these variables if you want to.
What do you think of my drawings? Helpful? Useful?
Let me know.
II. Strategy isn’t what you say…it is what you do:
Actions speak louder than words.
Think about it like this: You are always doing strategy, even if you don’t realize it.
The worst strategic practitioners, run around like chickens with their head cut off.
Strategy doesn’t mean you’ll be inflexible. Strategy means you’ll be flexible within a framework of understanding what success looks like.
Or, if the destination changes, you realize that something has changed and you must act differently.
Why does this happen? Strategy as a term has been thrown around so regularly now that it is almost meaningless. It is in the vein of people throwing around marketing and advertising like they are the same thing.
My working definition of strategy: a process that helps a business create the best environment for success.
How do I look at strategy: I look at it through the question: “Why are some organizations succeeding while others are failing?”
Why do you need it? Even if y’all are in huge organizations, you don’t have the resources to throw around willy nilly.
Everyone needs strategy.
Here’s my belief: the smaller the organization, the more important the strategic choice is.
Because you don’t have the money, time, or resources to try and go after the entire market.
III. The NBA tightens its belt after having “record attendance” and “sell outs”:
After the piece on the Jet’s employee standing at a scanner, scanning in tickets to boost attendance…trust but verify is my mantra.
Busted! I didn’t trust the numbers on attendance before that point.
What is happening?
The “V” shaped recovery is over.
Talk to any broker, they’ll tell you about all the tickets that they are losing money on.
Look at the numbers of many organizations and you’ll see that the actual percentage of “butts in seats” is much lower than it was in 2019. In some cases I’ve seen, 25%+ lower.
That means:
Lower revenue
Lower sales
Less impact
This drives a “doom loop” of destructive business habits like discounts.
Why is this happening?
First, the sales and marketing practices in a lot of places are stale.
Okay, not stale, outdated.
Second, pricing has gotten out of hand in some places.
This is driving away fans. Look at the empty seats at the Heat v. Bucks playoff game earlier in the week.
So, a lot of brokers are buying tickets, supporting the price in the short term, but in the long term it is destructive to the perceived value of the sport and attending games.
This isn’t exclusive to any one sport because I can give you a hundred different “family and friends” discounts from baseball sales reps.
Third, data v. research.
The active vs. the reactive.
Data is all focused on the rearviewmirror. Research is the scientific method in action. Hypothesis-Design-Analysis.
IV. Building on last week’s marketing of teams and events, DON’T BE BORING!
If you are selling a once in a lifetime event, why are you making it sound like the least exciting thing possible.
Like Phillip says, “Boring is Expensive”.
Every event you are a part of is a once in a lifetime event.
Why?
You will never have the same group of people together in the same place at the same time again.
Never happens.
Every ticketed event is a once in a lifetime opportunity.
Make your marketing reflect that.
Why is this hard?
You look at other bad marketing and think, “This is how it is done.”
You hear other people telling you what “everyone” is doing.
You get lazy.
Committees wear down the edges.
Your success is directly related to your ability to position yourself in the market’s mind.
Why us? Why are we better than the alternative?
Tell folks!
P.S. I use this all the time and people’s hackles get up…
Some of your best marketing tactics:
Pick an enemy
Stand out against the “conventional wisdom”
Be contrarian
The job is to be noticed…not to be loved by being anodyne.
V. Links:
DC struggles to get people back downtown:
This isn’t unique to DC. I’ve seen this in markets around the world.
I bring this up because in this week’s webinar, I talked about knowing your market.
Consideration needs to be given to the traffic habits and work habits of your target audience. If they aren’t coming into the office any longer, that is likely to change the things they will do for entertainment.
Pep Guardiola teaches us that the one constant in life is change:
Too many places, the same business model, same ideas, same approach is the given.
Pat Riley once said, “The only thing certain in life is change. And, when she rears her beautiful face, you embrace her.”
Pep Guardiola has maintained his dominance as a manager by never standing still.
What lesson can we take from this persistent belief in improvement?
Billion Dollar Strategy Framework: I’m putting the finishing touches on a whole new line of ideas/workshops/services called ‘Billion Dollar Strategy’ and that really focuses on helping people use the best strategy concepts and tools from my work with businesses big and small to achieve their goals more quickly.
The Framework:
Define success
Know your market
Have a position
Get the resources in place
Take action
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