Trying to figure out what the future of the business of tickets, sports, and live entertainment right now is pretty much impossible.
We are in the middle of a pandemic that has cases building around the world again. Until the pandemic is under control, we won’t be seeing fans come back to stadiums, theatres, or arenas.
While no one can tell us when things will start to normalize again and the future of many organizations is tenuous, we can take the time we have been given and look at what we would hope the industry of the future will look like.
I’ve got 3 things that I think would help expedite the recovery of the live entertainment industry when customers and fans can return.
A renewed customer focus:
There is a simple concept in marketing called “Market Orientation” and this idea simply means, in your business you start the development of your strategy by looking at your business through the eyes of the customer.
As with any concept, there are often competing concepts like sales orientation, product orientation, and advertising orientation.
Over the last decade, we’ve seen the world of entertainment, sports, and concerts fall into the trap of
- Sales orientation where all sales look like good sales and we just try to squeeze everyone into something no matter what.
- Product orientation where we just throw together different packages and products and look for folks to sell our stuff.
- Advertising focus where we allow our broadcast partners to just throw out whatever message benefits them and no consideration for what we need from the relationship.
The problem with letting some of these things penetrate and live in your organization include:
- Revenue becomes the end-all and profit becomes secondary. Like when pricing is out of line and discounts are used to goose sales because tickets aren’t moving.
- You assume that marketing is all about educating the market and that all you have to do is build a new product or plan and educate people on why working with you or going is valuable.
- Or, you just blast out messages and posts and content without really thinking through how the messages build towards a sale or all of these messages come out based on what you would like to see or, worse, think the customer or prospect wants.
These ideas drive down profits. They harm sales. They make retention more difficult. And, each product often is less successful than the last because in far too many places, people don’t really know what their customers want.
During the pandemic what has been amazing is the number of organizations and teams that have reached out to me to talk about observations and information I’ve been sharing about customer intention and customer mentality during the pandemic like:
- Customers were rethinking their ticket buying habits before the pandemic.
- Customers aren’t going to rush back to events right away after the pandemic.
- Customers are frustrated because in a lot of cases they aren’t hearing from their sales reps or the teams they do business with. Or, when they do it is about an auto renewal or in a few instances price hikes that seem to poorly reflect reality.
I could go on…but people are like how do you know so much about these things.
Simple. I talk to your customers.
The heart of being market oriented is getting to know your customers.
Over the years, I’ve written and talked about sports teams that send out poorly formatted lists of their games with suite prices and the ask if a customer wants to buy?
I’ve talked about the way that pricing is often out of touch with reality and that the reason people aren’t going to more games is because they’ve been trained to think that a baseball game is only a special occasion or out of their price range.
Many folks have made the point that it is pretty eye-popping when you get sent a screen shot of a missed call log that has the same sports’ teams call center calling 25 or more times in a week.
I could go on to point out the way that Hamilton has saved many arts organizations because they had bundled the tickets to the show with a commitment to a year or two subscription.
Which may be smart in the short term, but really means that you were fortunate not good.
I’m belaboring this point to lead off because I ask almost every executive, VP, and manager how often they talk with customers. Many of them hem and haw, mumble about talking to someone in passing, but I’m pretty certain in most cases this is hiding the embarrassment of not really being that in tune with their customers.
To be fair, this isn’t unusual. This is actually pretty common.
But it also highlights a problem that all of us must deal with: WE ARE NOT OUR MARKET!
This means that as soon as we start collecting a paycheck from a business, we magically forget everything that we might know about what it means to be a customer of this venue or team.