4.08
Unique Ticket Sales Campaigns
byMichael Rudd|April 19th, 2012
Have you ever heard this before in a ticket sales campaign?We will now accept your hard earned cash for a sporting event over a year away!Put your money down NOW OR ELSE miss the chance of seeing your favorite team next year live and in person.And of course my old favorite…SEAT LICENSES!
Where are we headed as fans?
We have many, okay too many, choices as consumers today. It is true. But what that should empower us to do is be choosy and spend our money and our hard earned cash with our sports teams because they come up with great reasons and ways to get us into their arena or stadium and give us a great experience that we want to come back.
No I don’t think every place needs to be charging $10 tickets and I also think that beer and food is priced accordingly with a night out at a professional or college high level sporting event.
BUT…
I think sports teams both pro and college need to do a little better job in getting their fans to be fans not only of the players but of the management and personnel upstairs as well. Players come and go but these guys running the arenas and stadiums are there for much longer periods of time.
I feel instead of PUSHING their product on us they should PULL us in. Give us a reason, make us feel wanted, engage us to the point that we don’t feel like we just aren’t another dollar cashed at the door.
- MOST UNIQUE TICKET PROMOTION YET:Buy All Remaining Ticketsto Avoid a Blackout in the NFL!
A Cincinnati Bengal Chad Ochocinco did more for that franchise and for the fans than any athlete I remember in their history.
The most unique idea a team could do…if a team is close to a sell out but not there yet what better way to reward their fans than purchase all remaining tickets so that the game is not blacked out on TV locally and give away the remaining tickets through a promotion with a sponsor the day of the game.
THAT IS A UNIQUE TICKET SALES PROMOTION
In 2009 against the Texans, Chad purchased 1,200 tickets to avoid the blackout and Motorola did a promotion downtown that day to get rid of the tickets. In 2010 once again with the blackout looming and the New Orleans Saints coming to town Chad bought 3,000 tickets to get fans butts in the seats.
And while I think Chad let his ego get the best of him in the end in Cincy and can’t learn routes in complicated offensive systems (see his New England season) I have no ill will towards him and he is probably my favorite Bengal of all time here is another example of something he did to engage fans:
He bought out an entire movie theatre and had them add a special Midnight showing for a movie to be released the next day (don’t remember the movie but it was something people were excited to see) and then invited down Bengals fans through Twitter to come see the movie with him for free.
Now that I think about it perhaps Chad should have a career after his NFL one ends in charge of ticket sales and promotions for a pro sports franchise.
What can sports teams learn?
Chad did something for the Bengals franchise with those promotions that can not be calculated on a balance sheet. There is a Bengals fan out there somewhere who probably has spent ten fold whathe would havesince then with the franchise because he apreciated so much the gesture of those free tickets.
Sports teams need to be creative just as businesses are today and listen to their customers and their sponsors. Create a reason for them to come down and make them want to come back.
It is not enough to announce “we are accepting deposits for 2013.”
It needs to go beyond that. The game is changing and especially in the pros many franchises are losing money. They can continue to lose money and keep doing their cheeseball ticket packages and promotions or they can step out of bounds and do some radical, gut wrenching with nerves, scary ticket promotions that may just turn their ticket sales around!
What do they have to lose? Be unique, be different, and be unordinary…I didn’t say you had to be cheap and give us free hot dogs remember that.
4.08
The Difficulty of Developing Profitable and Unique Sales Promotions By: James T. Berger, Managing Editor
A Universitiy of Houston professor, Betsy Gelb, and two of her doctoral candidate students, Demetra Andrews and Son K. Lam, set off to provide a most intriguing hypotehesis – sales promotions that are easy for consumer to adopt but difficult for competitors to imitate, would be disproportionately profitable.
The development and discussion of this hypothesis is reported in the MIT Sloan Management Review May 15, 2007, online exclusive article entitled “A Strategic Perspective on Sales Promotion.”
The authors point out that a key problem with sales promotions is they can’t be legally protected like trademarks and at the same time they are easily imitated. What makes this situation so frustrating is that sales promotion activity currently absorbs 31 percent of marketing budgets.
Example: GM Promotion
They cite as an example the General Motors promotion – “you pay what we (employees) pay” promotion that came out in the summer of 2005. After only five weeks, both Chrysler and Ford replicated the promotion. The authors cite that analysts estimate the promotion cost GM about $5,000 per vehicle sold before it was ended in September, 2005. The authors report that this promotion was a contributor to GM’s North America operations loss of $4 billion during the first nine months of 2005. The year 2005 was marked by a 4 percent decline in sales and a 50 percent decline in GM’s stock value.
“The unhappy outcomes for GM – and similar ones for imitators Daimler-Chrysler and Ford – illustrate the negative consequence of easy-to-copy promotions, but this example is hardly unique,” write Gelb/Andrews/Lam. “An analysis of 20 years of research evaluating sales promotions indicates that most such promotions do not pay off, and even studies painting a happier picture find no more than 60 percent earning back their costs.”
Successful Unique Promotions
In contrast, Gelb/Andrews/Lam point out two unique General Motors’ sales promotions that delivered successful results.
The first was the Pontiac’s use of an episode of the Donald Trump “Apprentice” series where teams competed to produce brochures for the 2006 Pontiac Solstice, a new compact convertible. Viewers were brought into this promotion by being offered an early chance to purchase the Solstice, and with ties to supplementary Web promotions. Pontiac ended up pre-selling more than 7,000 cars and quickly became the market share leader in the compact convertible category.
A second unique promotion involved Cadillac’s Super Bowl advertising touting the ability of its V-series cars to hit 60 miles per hour in less than 5 seconds. Cadillac developed a special Web site promoting a “Five Second Film Competition,” and invited participant visitors to shoot and upload a five-second film on any topic. More than 2.5 million consumers visited the Web page and some 2,600 submitted entry films. According to Gelb/Andrews/Lam, “Cadillac reported in its award-winning “Reggie” entry that in the four months following the promotion, sales of the Cadillac V-series jumped by 25 percent.”
Gelb/Andrews/Lam further write: “Any sales promotion worth its salt will increase sales, but creating a profitable promotion is more difficult.”
Features of Successful Promotions
The authors then present what they believe are the three key features inherent to successful promotions:
It provides the sponsor with a period of exclusivity because it precludes or delays imitations but encourages quick buyer response. They write: “This criterion is the most critical in avoiding promotional losses. Difficulty of imitation may occur either because of a unique association of the promotion with its sponsor or because some hard-to-duplicate resource makes imitation difficult. Quick buyer response is encouraged by a promotion that is simple to understand, ideally with informative elements or emotionally appealing components of both.”
It does not rely on discounting alone, but communicates something about the company, the brand, or the specific goods or services offered. Gelb/Andrews/Lam write: “It informs potential purchasers or creates an emotional bond, even if the message connecting the brand to the potential buyer is conveyed indirectly.”
It is launched by companies that have some differential advantage in the marketplace already. “Sales promotions don’t create that advantage as much as they exploit it,” according to Gelb/Andrews/Lam.