Recovery in the world of live entertainment, tickets, sports ticket sales, etc. will take courage and risk taking…and a lot more than most folks are comfortable with.
I’ve been re-reading David C. Baker’s great book on expertise and entrepreneurial expertise, The Business of Expertise, the last few days to get my mind right for the rest of the year and the long slog that is likely to continue to be facing many of us for the next months, if not a bit longer.
Recently, I’ve been talking to a lot of folks in the world of sports business, arts, and tickets about what the future looks like and how do folks move forward now, in the face of the most brutal period in the industry’s history, and one that has no sign of really subsiding.
Hidden inside the question is the concept or question: “What’s the magic bullet that will get everyone out of this?”
The short answer: there isn’t one.
Stop the presses, there will be no miracles today.
But as I was working my way through David’s book today, I came upon the chapter that talks about the thing that folks that are successful entrepreneurs have in common, in 99+% of the cases, they are risk takers.
I have spoken on risk around the world and framed it in a number of ways, but let me offer this definition of risk taking up for you as a way to begin the conversation forward:
Risk taking is simply the willingness to set a goal or destination. Recognize that there will be challenges in front of you the whole way, some you’ll know and some you won’t know until you reach them. Deciding whether or not the goal or destination is worth the challenge of taking action. And, deciding whether to go or not to go. Then doing it.
As Seth Godin says in his book, The Dip, quitting should happen regularly but you have to know when to quit and when to push through the dip.
This is all to say that to recover from the pandemic and the recession that is going on in partnership with the pandemic, folks are going to have to get a lot more comfortable with risk taking and act more courageously than they have had to in the past because there aren’t going to be many clear 100% accurate decisions and the truth is that most of the decisions that will need to be made will have a certain likelihood of blowing up in your face.
In between the lines of the stories of the NFL’s ratings for week one, combined with the long-term decline of the NBA’s ratings, and the trends around real turnstile attendance is a bit of magical thinking that there is only one direction that everything will go and that once events can reopen that things will immediately come back to normal.
What happens if the trends of total TV viewership that were slowly drifting downward, but have accelerated a bit in the pandemic continues? Or, accelerates to match the pandemic level decline?
How about the continued increase in revenue from ticket sales and in-stadium experiences?
Yesterday, it was reported that AB-InBev is cutting back their sponsorship spend by 25%.
Before the pandemic, a number of corporate buyers were telling me that they were going to pull back on the way they were buying tickets because they weren’t achieving the necessary value from their purchases and could more easily purchase what they needed from the secondary market.
There are a lot of problematic trends.
While the attendance and revenue numbers for Broadway and the West End were high and reaching greater heights before the pandemic, there were any number of performing arts organizations, theatres, and other arts organizations that were struggling to continue to achieve their subscription and ticket sales numbers, to drive revenue, and keep the arts vibrant in their communities.
In many places, the saying that is whispered about the marketing plan for the arts or theatre is “Our strategy is getting older and whiter, but it isn’t a very good one.”
What does courage and risk-taking look like right now?
First, the value proposition.
I saw a post on LinkedIn that talked about the value of the video experience and the streaming experience and how a venue was able to bring in $44,000 from a live stream event.
The idea that hung in the air was about the value for the patron.
The reality is that the key thing to always keep in mind about selling tickets to anything is “Why is this valuable to the people I am trying to reach?”
Tony Knopp tweeted out a short thread about the AB-InBev sponsorship story that talked about sponsors being so far ahead of their partners on the team side in regards to data and that so many organizations have no idea why people buy from them.
I’ll go further and say that from my conversations, most businesses in live entertainment have no idea why folks are buying from them.
They make a lot of assumptions about what folks find valuable that may or may not be relevant or realistic.
This shows up because almost everywhere you go, you find that most of these businesses are product focused and not market focused.
This is a basic marketing tenant, but one that maybe doesn’t get enough purchase in the world of live entertainment…but being market focused is understanding what the customer values and delivering on that promise.
Being product focused means, build it and let me convince them to come.
As we can see from the scores of discounts, boiler room sales teams, and empty seats at venues, stadiums, and arenas around the world, being product focused isn’t working out too well for most folks.
In coming out of the pandemic, the need to really focus on what the value is for the customer and delivering on that promise is going to be even more important.
How do you know what folks really want?
Ask them.
Start there.
Find out what they like about the live event experience, find out what they don’t like, but most importantly find out what they want from their recreation and entertainment experience to be valuable to them.