Why Demand Is The Biggest Issue In Tickets

Week 1 of the NFL is almost in the books and as much as anything else about the first week of the schedule two big stories popped up that don't bode well for pushing aside the narrative of flagging interest in the NFL.

1. Ratings for the opening Thursday night game were the lowest since 2009, despite featuring the NFL's marquee franchise: the New England Patriots.
2. California seemed to have not received the memo that the season was starting.

Which comes on top of baseball facing a continued challenge to grow attendance. The Mayweather/McGregor fight underperforming at the box office. And, many other events not living up to expectations in attendance.

The typical response around the industry has been to roll out some variation of the following ideas:

"Winning will solve our problems."

"Millennials just don't buy or watch in the same ways as other generations."

"Politics/hurricanes/Game of Thrones was stealing people's attention."

So on and so forth.

What never quite comes around to be addressed is that falling attendance and falling ratings signal one, big flashing challenge that when it isn't addressed, makes people look out of touch and completely ridiculous: that idea...

DEMAND!

The first rule of business is that you have a job: to win and keep customers.

That typically means marketing and selling according to value.

If you aren't attracting customers, up the ante on value.

If you aren't retaining customers, up the ante on the value they receive.

It is the iron law of business: to stay in business, you need to make customers and keep them. Because customer acquisition is both expensive and takes a lot of time.

The fun thing about sports is that typically we have always had an ingrained sales force, previous generations of fans that sold the next generation of fans on our product.

Somewhere, that chain of constantly renewable fans and customers was broken.

In the seminal book, Bowling Alone, Robert D. Putnam talks about the professionalization of many non-profits and how the close knit communities that had driven most non-profits was lost in the 1960s to commercialization of their organization and fundraising activities.

This drove a phenomenon where "membership" increased, "donations" increased, and from an outward statistical point of view things looked pretty good.

The only challenge was that connection was lost and that non-profits found themselves less communities and connected groups of individuals, but more just fundraising and marketing mechanisms for whatever cause they were working on at the time.

To make the point explicit, this means that non-profits were profit rich, but terribly unstable from a membership and attention standpoint.

I have a feeling that for many of our sports teams, leagues, and many live entertainment performers that we have entered a stage where the same situation is playing itself out now.

Since around the 1990s, the idea of the entertainment business has become much more professionalized.

In sports, you have seen this play out by teams employing a more systemized and quantified sales system. You've seen an overwhelming push towards data, quantification, and monetization in all areas.

This has played out fantastically on the national TV level because the TV money was on a bullet train for a number of years.

The same can be said about live entertainment in the form of concerts, theatre, and other forms of live performance.

In these cases, the revenue numbers have increased tremendously. Even when in many cases, the rewards have only been reaped by a very small percentage of acts.

All of these examples mirror pretty consistently the idea that Putnam wrote about back in the late-1990s, as the industries have grown and become more professionalized, the connection of the average person has gone down.

This is problematic for a lot of reasons:

First, there are just a limited number of new customers that you can hope to turn over each year.

While there is likely plenty of opportunity, the fact is that once you lose a customer, getting them back is really, really, really tough...if not impossible.

Second, we can become lulled into putting too much emphasis on revenue, attendance, or some other easily measured number to signify the health of our organization.

This is important because sometimes the data doesn't give us the full story. We can become guilty of "confirmation bias." Which means that we can pull and use the numbers that are most beneficial to our narrative or to our current state of mind.

Third, in both of the above cases, we neglect the iron rule of business: you must build and keep customers.

If you base all of your decisions on easy to measure numbers, or the momentarily convenient, you end up making a lot of decisions that are penny wise and pound foolish.

Which brings us back to the scene that has been playing out with much too much frequency lately in stadiums, arenas, and ballparks around the world and has also played out in lower ratings becoming an increasing challenge.

That scene signifies one tremendous issue: demand isn't where it needs to be.

You can pick any of the above excuses for the decline or create a new one, but the reality is that demand isn't there and demand is much more tenuous than ever before.

Peter Drucker used to say that we need to spend more time dealing with "the future that has already occurred" and in live entertainment we need to do that as well. Because without a realistic approach to improving demand, we aren't likely to see a change in our attendance or ratings anytime soon.

What can we do to alter the demand dynamic?

First, we need to focus on direct response opportunities.

We have some pretty clear opportunities for our call-to-actions to be heeded and acted upon.

That's great because it allows us to gather feedback and adapt a new strategy or new action pretty quickly.

What do I mean?

We can ask people to buy a ticket?

Watch a game?

Visit a sponsor?

Or, whatever other action we want them to take.

Unfortunately, most of our advertising is milquetoast in this regard...at best.

The call to action in most cases is implied but never overtly stated.

In fact, most of the advertising and marketing that we see could be regarded as vanity marketing or affinity marketing, meant to make sure you have "awareness" of the brand, team, game, or sponsor, but never really directly putting the short term immediate response right in front of you.

Why not?

We see retailers do this in other industries with great impact. Why not us?

Second, get into the habit of telling more and better stories.

Stories used to be the realm of sports writers. We had this romantic connection to the season long narrative that a baseball writer would weave about a team, a player, a season.

The same would go for basketball and football and hockey to a lesser extent.

But somewhere along the line, we have fallen into a trap of talking about the "sports writers' narrative" but most of the narratives are weak, redundant, or not compelling.

Part of the blame lies in the way that we have media trained the personality out of most of our athletes.

It used to be that we would get a great story from a guy like Moses Malone and his "Fo'! Fo'! Fo'!"

Now a great story like that is unlikely to ever happen.

What this does is destroys the magic that should be part of experiencing entertainment. There needs to be a mysticism to the act of consuming entertainment, something that transports us to another world, takes us away from our everyday lives.

Certain musicians still capture the imagination in that way:

Think of the way that Pearl Jam rolls out a new setlist at every show and how that builds the excitement and community around their tours, their shows, and being a fan of the band.

Or, how about the way that an organization like Manchester United has built themselves into as much a media company as a sports business. So that they can engage, monetize, and nurture the largest audience of sports fans in the world?

The thing about building stories into our narrative is that stories peak the imagination. We are a storytelling animal and it is how we have conveyed our most essential ideas, concerns, and beliefs throughout history.

To tell stories is just a natural part of who we are. To not use them is stealing our most essential element.

Finally, we must make our outreach and connection much more proactive and much more human.

The days of being guaranteed a fan base are over.

We used to be almost guaranteed a certain level of support no matter what.

That may still be true, but the level is much lower.

Part of that is that we maybe took those fans for granted.

Maybe it was easy to price tickets according to what you saw listed on the secondary market.

Or, maybe you could offer up an uninspiring mix of food and beverage?

Possibly you didn't have to work so hard at creating great merchandise.

On and on, this kind of thing erodes your connection to the fan, the buyer, the prospect.

Then because you aren't as connected to the fan in a real sense, you don't know the fan, or customer as well. This means that over time your communications can take on the tone of a mass message, no personalization.

These things aren't fast. They don't happen with a sudden thunderclap.

But the eventual happens, you stop having an ongoing conversation with your audience and you start talking at them.

You've seen those advertisements, they are everywhere on your web traffic. They are banner ads that follow you all over the place. They are cookies that help you be re-targeted at, but no connection ever occurs.

Seth Godin asked in one of his blog posts, "When did marketers stop being human?"

I'd say slowly at first. Then all of a sudden.

That's why it is so important for all of us to become more human, to connect proactively.

To put yourself on a proactive footing, the simplest path is to try to figure out what you want your theme to be, your brand to stand for, and what people should think of when they think of your organization.

If you have a clear understanding of the image, brand, values you want to convey, you can take the next step of coming up with a plan for the amount of communications you need to deliver and the types of messages you want to deliver.

Then you need to take action.

That's pretty simple.

My biggest piece of advice is not to bite off too much at once. Pick one, two, or three things and make sure you nail those first.

Once you are doing a great job, you can always add. If you become too scattered too quickly, you will likely fall back into that trap of impersonal, mass advertising and messaging that has failed to connect.

But bigger than any ad campaign, social media schedule, or other marketing effort, the biggest thing you have to do is become more human in your interactions and your marketing.

In this regard, you need to understand that everything you do counts. That means it isn't just enough to make your sales and marketing materials about connection and being human. You need to design your entire experience around generating human connections with your customers, fans, and prospects.

Because demand isn't just driven by marketing, it is driven by how you make people feel.

Demand is driven by how you make people feel before a game, event, or concert. Demand is created when someone enjoys a great experience in your building. Demand is created when you follow up and follow through after an event with timely messages.

The key is that you really have to make sure you inject empathy, connection, and humanity into every step of the process.

When you combine these things, you have a chance to pick the demand up into your building.

If you choose to do business as usual, winning may make a difference. But I wouldn't hold my breath.