1. The Big Story: MLB Attendance Down in 21 Markets:
Big Ideas:
- Tickets sold vs. through the turnstile is an important consideration.
- Looking at the top line revenue number is a dangerous habit to have.
- I’m sure pricing and the inflationary pressures of going to a game aren’t a problem at all when it comes to attendance.
I’ve struggled a bit to write about baseball this year because there have been so many stories to draw inspiration from to use to teach you a strategic lesson.
Why do I feel like I’m having a hard time?
No clue. I tried to figure it out, but I couldn’t put a finger on it.
But this article from before the All-Star Game by a friend of the newsletter and the pod, John Wall Street, helped me see some potential ideas to look at this morning.
The gist of Corey’s article is that baseball is down in 21 markets that he could find data for and shortly after we saw it was 23. I know Corey, so his article gets the extra clicks.
Either way, we see baseball attendance down in over 70% of their markets from 2019. And, if I were on the other side of the table, I’d be looking for ways to spin this as not as bad as it seems.
But the eye test right now for the game is just pretty bad.
You name a stadium and more likely than not the attendance won’t look down, but down to the point that you are asking if it is still batting practice or a weather delay going on.
I’m going to do a challenge and opportunity breakdown here because I think it might be more effective at allowing me to make the proper points.
Challenges, first.
First, look at the issues from the right point of view.
That’s my job with most of the people I work with at this point, I am a sounding board to help them move beyond the way that they see things.
And, I see in the way that MLB talks about the attendance issues the challenge of needing to look at attendance from several different perspectives.
Second, branding and brand management.
The brand of baseball has taken some hits and continues to take some hits. Like Lou DePaoli says, death spirals can happen.
The first step in stopping that begins with some serious investigation into the brand strategy.
The third challenge is strategy before tactics.
This shows up in a lot of the situations that I look at or read about when it comes to baseball.
We can probably see the hints of these challenges in a lot of places, but let’s go to the opportunities here.
First, there is still a market for live entertainment. People still want to gather, but you are going to need to market differently.
Second, the amount of product available creates opportunities to brand build almost constantly in-season and that can be a springboard to year-round attention.
Third, despite a decline in attention, attendance, and awareness the distinctive brand assets of MLB are still remarkably strong.
Let’s couple this stuff into solutions now.
First, do some proper strategy work.
Strategy is shown through your actions and I still see the actions that MLB is taking in a lot of places as being disjointed and tactically driven.
In my strategy work, I teach people to walk through 5 steps:
- Name your ambition
- Pick your market segment
- Develop a value proposition
- Identify the needed resources
- Create an action plan
I also make the action plan something we revisit every 30 days to ensure that we are not getting drawn back into the hot issue or the sexy idea at the cost of the ultimate success.
Second, brand management should be a constant conversation.
Two definitions here:
- Branding is the thing.
- Brand management is the process of creating the Brand.
- Your brand is the accumulation of all of the interactions your market has with you, good or bad, over time. Remember, the good stuff adds up slowly and the bad stuff tears you down with great speed.
Brand management is the process and the process isn’t as hard as people want to make it out to be. I can explain it to you quickly in a couple of bullet points:
- What’s our target segment?
- What’s the position we are taking?
- What are our objectives?
- How will we achieve them?
- What codes are we going to use to ensure folks know it’s us?
It is slightly more than that, but not much, and if you just focus on these things you are far ahead of most of the competition.
Finally, rethink the way the ticket is packaged and re-scale pricing.
You have to do some market research. I was teaching some folks in Australia about pricing strategy last week and we got onto the idea of pricing research.
The short answer is you can do it and you should do it.
The longer answer is that you need to have a plan that gets you out of your preconceived ideas about your price and that pushes you past the easy things like comparing you to other products or teams in your market.
You are you, they are whatever they are.
To top this off, it is important to always remember that you don’t say what is valuable…your market does. So get out there and figure out what they want, then deliver an offer they’ll like and be willing to pay for at a price that seems a fair price for the offer being made, according to the customer.
Take homes:
- You aren’t your customer. So you have to get to know them.
- Strategy before tactics.
- Brand management is the process of managing your Brand.