Do You Look at What Your Ticket Buyers Say About You on TikTok?

Hey!

I’m trying something new on Wednesday, “First Wednesdays with Dave” and this month we will talk about planning for 2024. 

1 PM Eastern. December 6, 2023. 

A few stories for the day…

BTW, a picture to warm your heart…Penny the Bulldog catching some rays from the HappyLight. 

To the Tickets!

‘The Introverted Millennial’ on TikTok shares her experience buying Jonas Brothers tickets in Seattle. 

Dynamic Pricing, am I right?

The reason I’m sharing this one is because you need to read the comments section on the video. 

To all of the folks that are telling you that people don’t talk about how much they paid for a ticket or even find out what people paid next to them as a way to justify some of their pricing practices should spend a few moments with the comments section. 

Why?

Several reasons:

• You see how people are teaching each other to wait until the day of or week of for tickets. 
• You see how people openly talk about how to find the cheapest tickets. 
• You also see how easy it is for bad customer service stories to get passed from person to person. 

The lessons here:

• Dynamic pricing has positives and negatives. 
• Customer service is a form of marketing. 
• You need to get out there and listen to your customers. 

Thanks to Ticket News for the OG article on this. 

PS. This is a lesson I teach in my brand management class: brands with strong brand equity have little or no price elasticity. 

In English, it means if your brand is strong, you can hold your prices or raise them with little or no impact on sales…just like Dr. Martens. 

Do you ever check TikTok or social media to see what your ticket buyers are saying? 

To reinforce this, look at Redditors talking about the prices at Disney. $22 for a small rum drink?! 

Eventbrite calls out See Tickets: 

I’ve taught you over the years that one of your best marketing tools is picking an enemy. 

That’s what Eventbrite is doing here. 

They see what they think is an advantage that they can push and they are using positioning and picking an enemy as a tool in their marketing battle to win share versus a competitor. 

You might not be so overt about it but you should learn a couple of things:

• Your position should be about you, but also about the competition. You mix it. 
• A position should be relevant to the target customer. 
• Recognize who the message is aimed at. In this instance, someone in the industry pointed out the email, but my guess is that Eventbrite’s customers don’t care that Eventbrite is kicking See Tickets in the shins. 

BIG looks at trial lawyers:

Specifically, they look at how trial lawyers can create change with examples in tickets, college sports, and more. 

Long and dense reading about antitrust, but I find it helpful for my thinking on competition. 

Drop and Give Me 20:

This is an exercise that David C. Baker writes about in his book ‘The Business of Expertise’. 

It is an exercise designed to help you understand what exactly people are paying you for and the basis for your business. 

I took myself through the process to see if I could do it. 

It might be worth me doing it for the newsletter here next, but I’d be curious what you would say in the same situation. 

Mark Cuban sells control of the Mavericks: 

Mark is getting paid! 

I also don’t buy the line of thinking that the Adelson family is getting a discount here.

To me, without control, you are paying a premium to let someone else play the dominant role. 

But banking everything on the national media rights doubling or tripling in this environment is risky, at best. 

I could be missing something here, but this doesn’t feel like some sort of huge “discount”. 

It feels like Cuban is getting a slightly better deal because he is maintaining control of the basketball operations. 

Look at Manchester United’s sale of 25% of the club to Jim Ratcliffe. Ratcliffe paid £1.3B for 25% of the club that is valued at £5.95B by Sportico. 

What do you think though? 

Let me know. 

For the holiday season, share this issue with one friend or colleague that you think has been thinking about whether or not they need to monitor their fans conversations on social media!

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