The Peter Drucker quote above has been guiding my thinking a lot lately.
Because as we sit here at the end of the summer and we see a lot of ideas being bandied about in regards of how to sell tickets, get people to pay attention, and drive revenue, I wanted to take a moment to put down some ideas what future has already happened in sports and entertainment.
- Secondary market has already won: the fight to stop touts or defeat the secondary market is a lost battle because consumers have voted with their wallets. They have decided that they want easy transactions and that they want to buy what they want when they want it.
- Season Ticket Holders/Subscriptions have been destroyed: This in no way means that they are dead or buried, but the way that they have always been isn’t going to come back. There are a few reasons for this: a) the value isn’t high enough for modern buyers b) awareness is likely a challenge c) costs are a concern d) the sales process is too often focused on the organization and not the buyer. These are only 4, but if I listed 14, the answer would still be the same. These models have been destroyed and something new needs to fill the void.
- Customer experience has been an afterthought and what constitutes luxury/premium/acceptable is often not in line with other industries: Experience in the economy is key to success. If you aren’t providing an outstanding experience, someone else will. The challenge here is that the bar is constantly moving. So the set it and forget it model of customer experience isn’t going to work. The thing is, if we aren’t innovating our experience, someone else will.
- In sports, teams and leagues have sold their fans up the river for the TV money and eyeballs that may or may not really be fans: Everything that isn’t TV money is just a rounding error. That’s probably a fact if you look at it from a strictly financial aspect, but if you look at the situation from the POV that if we don’t have people that care, we don’t have anything…it is wrongheaded. But as you can see with the NFL’s lip service of improving the viewing experience by shuffling their commercial breaks, TV is still driving everything even when I’d say that declining TV ratings is a lagging indicator of the league’s health that should have been evident when teams couldn’t fill their stadiums.
- Consumers care less than ever before about all of our entertainment options: We’ve all marketed far too long on the idea that people should love sports, arts, concerts, theatre. That’s a bad place to work from because the truth is we have to be fighting for our customers each and every day. If we aren’t someone else is and they will beat us. Which means that our prospects and customers don’t owe us anything. But we owe them everything.
This is only 5 things, but I think there is a lot that we can unpack from these things.
What say you?
Let me know in the comments.