If you don’t know the 4 Ps of marketing, they are:
- Product
- Price
- Promotion
- Place
This morning, I was reading a post that contained a conversation with Australian marketer, Mark Ritson, and a few other marketers chatting about some of the challenges facing marketers in 2020.
That got me to thinking about the challenges facing many of the folks I talk with regularly and then I took a look at a team in the US and how they were selling their premium products. So I wanted to go through and discuss the 4 Ps in the context of sports tickets for a moment to help me clarify my own thinking.
Product:
Products can be both tangible and intangible.
In thinking through a ticket, I think to sell them successfully, both things need to be present.
You need to have a tangible item which is the ticket to enter the stadium, the location, and any accompanying benefits from attending a game.
At the same time, if you are only selling that, you leave yourself open to the challenge many teams face: being hot or not.
Let’s say if LeBron James and the Lakers are coming to town, that is tangible in that he may only come through once a season if you live in DC like me.
At the same time, the intangible is what is it like to see the most successful NBA player of this generation live with his new sidekick, Anthony Davis.
Or, think back to the last few years of the Golden State Warriors when teams would open their buildings early so fans could watch Steph Curry warm-up.
Is it so novel to see someone warm-up?
No.
But is it novel to see one of the greatest shooters in NBA history go through his warm-up?
Absolutely.
Is this tangible or intangible?
I’d say both.
This idea filters down through any sport or event.
Look at visiting Fenway Park, obviously seeing the Green Monster is a tangible thing…but what about the emotional value in all of the history and stories attached to the Green Monster? To think they have no value would be ridiculous.
Or, going to any game or event at Madison Square Garden.
Same thing, right?
In my mind, the intangible is much more powerful as a tool for selling the ticket because you can’t easily quantify the first time you see the Green Monster, go to a Broadway show, or, possibly the only time you will ever see LeBron James.
Price:
If you ask me, this is the one area where we have really screwed up the most.
Why?
There are a lot of reasons like the rise of the secondary market on the internet, smarter dynamic pricing tools, and a basic loss of marketing chops.
In my head, understanding that a larger part of the product of the sports ticket lies in the intangible value, you have to recognize that just pricing based on location isn’t going far enough.
Sean Kelly from Vatic shared some really great examples of the way that customers think about their purchase from his research in the performing arts over the weeks leading up to INTIX this year.
He said that as marketers, we put more emphasis on what individuals think about what the person next to us paid for their ticket.
I believe the example he used was to compare buying a theatre ticket to buying a plane ticket.
How many of us have ever really asked the person next to us how much they paid for their ticket? I’m guessing no one.
But I got his point pretty clearly.
In thinking through the challenge of pricing, I’ve always fallen back on the idea that if I elevate the experience of someone, I can actually get them to willingly give me more money per visit.
I’ve told this story before, but I will share it again.
When I was getting started in nightclubs, we were trying to figure out how to get our per check average up by $.25. Which was really about 2-3% in revenue per person.
Totally doable.
What we discovered was that by asking different questions like “what kind of gin would you prefer?” when someone ordered a gin and tonic, we could justify a 17% increase in spend per transaction.
What did that mean for the bottom line?
That one question was worth about $250,000 in profit.
What does this have to do with pricing sports tickets?
A lot, I think.
Why?
Because over the past decade we’ve seen pricing fall into a bunch of different silos where tickets are one revenue spot, merchandise another, F&B another, and on and on.
This creates a couple of pricing challenges for folks:
- It seems like all too often no one person is making the pricing decision for the whole customer.
- Because of this, everyone is maximizing everything in the stadium.
- Customers are feeling like they can’t or shouldn’t go to games because the investment feels major, even when your team may play 81 games a year, like baseball.
So…I think in terms of pricing, a big leap would be to think about the customer through the entire trip to the ballpark and maximize according to the behavior you are hoping to create.
Promotion:
I’m out in front on this when I say I think as marketers a lot of us have lost the thread.
I talk to my marketing friends and they lament the fact that marketing has become just a way to promote stuff…and that the effectiveness of this is getting less every day.
But promotion has a huge role in the success of a team and its ticket sales.
As I’m on promotion, I realize that all 4 of the Ps should have their own post, but in terms of promotion…that’s absolutely the truth.
But in promoting