Who’s Afraid Of The Big Bad Group?

This is the story of my adventure on the other side of group sales.  I was the group leader trying to book lunch for a group of kids.

Over the holiday weekend my daughter’s pee wee hockey team was in a tournament near Patriot Place.  For those outside the Boston market, this is the New England Patriots version of City Walk or Downtown Disney.  At Patriot Place they have shops, entertainment venues, and restaurants.  We all agreed this would be a great place for the kids to have lunch after their game.

The kids wanted to go to Red Robin for burgers. So a week before the event I called them.  The date of our event happened to be Black Friday.  They informed me they could not book our group because they expected a big crowd.  I received the same response from every other family restaurant also. 

I sent an email to Red Robin explaining our situation.  Guess what, they called and made it happen!  Red Robin explained to me that they don’t normally book groups or take reservations. When we got there, they were ready for us at the exact time we asked for.  The service staff was great!  They had all 35 of us feed and out in one hour.  That is very impressive with a group of 12 year old girls.  The kids were happy and the parents only have good things to say for Red Robin.  In the end, we had a good customer experience and I know they will get repeat customers from our group.

You should also know that Patriot Place management was very understanding and tried to help us too.  They get it. They want groups coming to their place. They also tried contacting a few restaurants for us.

Here is what I don’t understand.  Why would any organization turn down guaranteed business if they have the capacity?  All of these restaurants had no idea how much business they would get on Black Friday.  In fact the weather was really bad that day with heavy rain and chilly.  This was predicted.  Patriot Place is an outdoor area with indoor shops. As we walked around the area we saw how low the attendance was due to the weather.  If you can book a group, does it not help you when the walk-up customers stay away?  Is it not better to know what you have versus not knowing?  Why are some people still afraid of group sales?

Talk Is Cheap But Its Worth Gold

People are doing more talking then ever before.  You can thank the internet and cell phones for this.  They are not just talking with their mouths.  They are writing, blogging, and social networking.  These words and conversations are what is influencing decisions and moving product. 

As event and entertainment marketers we should not only use these marketing methods, we should also listen and read what they are saying.  A lot of our marketing decisions can be made based on what our customers tell us.  So often we forget to listen to our customers.  It reminds me of the Verizon fios TV commercial where the cable guy asks “why are we listening to customers, seems dumb”.  Customers tell us everything we need to know to be successful.  So many times we just tell them what they want and need.

One the best and cheapest marketing methods: strike up a conversation.  This is really easy to do.  You know who your target market is, so go to them.  On the internet find out where they hang.  What social sites do they use?  What blogs do they read?  Read what they are saying.  Ask them questions. Don’t be scared of the negative.  Use this for positive change.  

You don’t have to use just the internet.  Meet them live, face to face.  Go where your customers are.  This could be at your venue.  Instead of walking around with a clip board, invite them to a table or booth.  Give them a gift for their honest conversation.  We are always doing contests with text messaging at events.  Why not have them text you their opinions? If you market a sports team, why not go to youth sports games? Talk to the kids.  They are your future.

I am a firm believer in having a finger on the pulse of our customers.  Two way talk will do the trick.

Hype Builds Hype

Unless you have been living in the woods with no form of communication, you most likely know what movie came out today.  I take that back, you probably do know because some werewolf is doing PR in the woods.

The release of “New Moon” is a perfect example of building hype.  Not only did they do a great job of building hype, they built hype on top of hype.  You cannot not turn on your TV without seeing something about this movie.  They are the talk of the social network sites.  They have made the stars of the movie into a screaming frenzy not seen since the Beatles came to America.

The movie has not received rave reviews.  But who cares?  If you have the right product with the right PR and hype, you can overcome anything. Do you think all those teenage girls care about reviews?  As event & entertainment marketers we can learn from the marketing of this movie.

The amount of PR this movie is getting is mind blowing.  If you handle PR in your market, you should be taking notes.  If you hire, pay, or budget PR in the live event business you should take notice.  Hollywood spends money on PR!  For some reason we dread spending money on PR in the live event business.

They have had the stars of the movie anywhere and everywhere.  They had hundreds of screaming girls at my local mall this week.  The mall management was smart and did the event in the new part of the mall.  This is an area with high price stores and no customers.  I bet that is most amount of people that part of the mall has ever seen.

We need this kind of hype filled live events for our venues.  I don’t see why we can’t. 

Have a great weekend!

Is There No Shame?

In the past I have been accused of always picking on Ticketmaster when it comes to ticketing issues.  This is not true at all.  I am an equal opportunity offender.  If an issue rears its ugly head, I believe we as an industry should bring it up and discuss it.  Today’s blog post is not about Ticketmaster.  Today I am picking on a ticket broker. 

Unless you live in the Boston market, you may not have heard about the ticket fiasco between Ace Tickets and New Kids on the Block.  The New Kids are doing a fundraiser at the Boston House of Blues for Toys for Tots.  Proceeds from ticket sales are going to the charity.  Somehow Ace has lots of tickets selling on their website for as much as $300 per ticket.  The actual cost of the tickets is $60 each. Donnie Wahlberg from the band announced his disgust that ticket brokers were scooping up all the tickets for a fundraiser.  Ace released an apology and said they would give their profits from the sale of tickets to the charity.  Ace claimed they didn’t know it was a fundraiser.

Here are my questions:

1. How did Ace not know this was a fundraiser?  If you are going to be in the ticket selling business, don’t you need to know what you are selling?
2. How did Ace get the tickets in the first place?  I thought Live Nation and Ticketmaster (not picking on TM) have technology in place to prevent this from happening? If so, who gave Ace the tickets? Was it the venue, band, promoter, etc…?
3. Once Ace realized their mistake, why didn’t they give back all the unsold seats?

As an industry, we need to stop all this crap and start marketing and selling tickets in a correct way so that our customers will want to buy our seats. The blame is industry wide.  This goes from the agents & managers, to the acts, promoters, venues, and ticket agencies. Our customers are starting to look at us as not a legit business. We are better then all this. We are not the Wild Wild West.

Current Keys To Success: Pocketbook & Misson

Last week we discussed how we should follow retails lead going into the holiday shopping season.  If you haven’t noticed already, top retailers & brands seem to have a similar message.  As Walmart’s current tagline states: “Save money, live better”.

There is an article in today’s Adage Online about marketers selling the mission.  P&G, Unilever, and Walmart are among the brands and retailers that are pushing this marketing approach.  Today’s marketing trend is all about how your brand is helping someone.

As event & entertainment marketers you might say “how do I say that when I am only selling tickets”.  The business of selling tickets is not that different from selling a P&G product.  The one big difference is that most of our products are discretionary dollars. 

Think about what your product does for your customer.  For most of our shows and events we put smiles on people’s faces.  During this time of stress and recession, this is a really great thing. Think of our events and shows as a “mental health holiday”.  Remember what I always preach “we are the escape”.  If you don’t want to discount tickets right from the start, why not price the event or tour as ”fan friendly”. 

Emotions and price are our two most sellable tools after the event brand itself.  As you put together your marketing plans, try to incorporate these two important assets.

Becareful Of Too Much Free eMarketing

We can all agree that too much of anything can hurt you.  Too much food, drink, drugs, etc…  This also goes for marketing through technology.

As many of you know, I follow event & entertainment marketing peeps through Facebook, Twitter, and Linkedin.  Many of these marketers are using this social technology to market, which is great.  If you are using the technology too much are you losing your customers interest?

This morning I received a Facebook invite for an event from an arena venue.  They use Facebook on a regular basis to promote their events.  Today’s problem is that I received the same invite at least 10 times.  I am sure this is not the venue’s fault.  Something is probably “whacked” with Facebook.  This is a potential hazard with using other’s free technology.  You depend on them to help you get the message out but you are also at their mercy when they f*** up.

Another potential hazard with using today’s free marketing technology is the question of when is too much?  If you send out emails everyday are people reading them or are they deleting them?    Do you start going unnoticed?  The same goes for promoting your event on the social networks.  If you are pushing every single day, sometimes several times a day, are your customers reading it? 

The internet is very different from television.  When you run lots of TV spots, you hope to reach all your potential customers with at least one of the spots.  When you send messages directly to a customer via email or a social network site, they are most likely getting your message the first time.

Feedback Friday

From: Tweeter is Finally Cool with the Younger Gen 11/02/09

I think it’s interesting to discover how different demographics use Twitter. Perhaps the older generation are using it more for business, and perhaps the younger kids are using it for more social purposes. I think you’ll find this is also relative to mobile phone use. I use Twitter on my phone, but hardly ever log in online. However, I use Facebook more online.  Iain Bluett, Ticket Alternative

From: Want to Move Tickets: Push Group Sales 11/11/09

Joe I believe the reason group sales is not held as very important to the industry is because the industry is far better at order taking and making an additional profit on the order taking transaction than they are on providing and managing a true sales process and staff which is viewed only as an added expense. Those are the thoughts of a very old timer who once knew what the term customer service really meant and worked for employers who did too.  David Rosenwasser

Have a great weekend!

Want To Move Tickets: Push Group Sales

Tickets to events are down and promoters and venues are scratching their heads on what to do.  One of the answers might be right in front of them: group sales.

Group sales have been a part of events and entertainment forever.  I believe they have not always received the respect they deserve.  Depending on the event, they have been a priority or a stepchild. 

Several years ago I was involved with a group sales dot com.  The response we received depended on who we were pitching.  If we pitched family shows or amusement parks, we were well received.  If we talked to concert promoters, not so much.  To this day, I still don’t understand the mentality of some concert promoters.  If your shows are selling out, great!  But not every show or tour does.  Why would you not want a group sales program in place to move tickets? 

Think about what group sales can do for your event.  It puts large quantities of butts in seats.  What is more important to you, moving single tickets or a bus load?  Yes, you do have to offer a package to groups.  Usually this is done with a discount.  If you buy anything in bulk you expect a price break, right? 

Group sales should be moved to the fore front of event and entertainment marketing for 2010.  Move marketing budget to groups.  This may involve putting more sales people on the streets.  This may include offering a little deeper discount for groups.  If you are not pitching bus companies and tour operators you need to start.  Many have sales departments.  They can become your extended sales force. 

Group sales today are more then school kids and seniors. Every one of us is in a group of some kind. What is your event target market?  What groups fit into it? The opportunities are endless and you might fill some cold empty seats.

Follow Retailers Holiday Lead

The holiday shopping period is about to start (actually it started before Halloween).  If you carefully study what retailers are doing for this period, you will see what the mindset of the consumer is. 

Today’s Wall Street Journal has a story in the Marketplace section on “Catering to the Recession Mentality”.  The bottom line in the article is that the consumer is going to be frugal this season.  Because of this, here are some interesting observations:

• Retailers are promoting “Black Friday” sales now
• Retailers are spending larger chunks of ad dollars in October & November
• Walmart is offering 100 toys at $10

What does this mean to all of us in the event & entertainment business?  I believe we should take a page from retail and follow their lead. 

We should:

• Put our 2010 events on sale now with a “buy early” offer
• Don’t just put the event on sale and not market it.  Budget some money toward the early sale
• We should absolutely use the holiday season in our marketing.  Example: “tickets make great stocking stuffers”

Think about the fact that while the economy may be starting to rebound, its not back yet.  With over 10% of the working population out of work and the other 90% scared about their jobs, consumers are very tight with the money.  Especially with the discretionary dollars. 

We are not a necessity of life.  However, it is this time of year when consumers are looking for nice things to spend on each other. This is gift season, recession or no recession.  Let’s take advantage of the holiday shopping season.  Put your 2010 events on sale now and give them a reason to spend money with you.

Word Of Mouth Marketing: Don’t Be Too Nice?

The internet has truly become a word of mouth marketing haven.  There are tons of social network sites, review sites, and product theme sites that offer free word of mouth opportunities.  If you make an effort to search the internet carefully, you will find an entire marketing campaign available to you.  But as with anything that’s free, there can be issues.  Here is a true story that just happened last week.

My daughter’s drum teacher Kevin has a nice small business going. He has built his business strictly on word of mouth. He is a great drum teacher!  As with any business, he would like to continue building his business so he looked to the internet. 

There is a website for reviews called Yelp. They have become a leading review site in cities throughout the U.S. and the world.  They promote the site as “real people, real reviews”.  While I have never added a review to the site, I have used the site to see what other people think of a business.  For example, I read Yelp reviews for the casino boat company I worked with.  It gave me a pulse of what our customers thought of the product.

Kevin decided to use Yelp to help with his word of mouth marketing.  He asked all his clients to write a review on the site.  Yes, he was taking a chance that someone might say something bad but that is what web 2.0 is all about.  After just a few days, about a dozen of his clients had already written reviews.  All of which were good reviews. 

Yelp decided that too many good reviews were coming in for Kevin and shut him down.  They even sent emails to some of the reviewers accusing them of being fake.  A ironic twist on this is that one of the “supposed fakers” was a potential advertising client of Yelp.  Do you think Yelp is going to get any of the marketing budget now?

Does Yelp want only bad reviews?  No, I don’t think so.  However, if they are going to be in the review space they need to have a better system.  They need to except the fact that businesses are going to use them as a word of mouth marketing tool, especially if they have a good product.

Do It Right, Hire An Expert

If you are not in the event or entertainment business and you are looking to produce an event, do yourself a favor and hire an expert. 

I can always tell when an event is not done by experts.  How many times have you been to an event and seen the problems and chaos that are results of poor planning and execution.  Like any other profession there are things that happen at all stages of planning and execution that only an expert will know.  Don’t get me wrong, shit happens when experts are involved too.  However, they usually have the expertise to fix the problems as they happen.  Your chances of a successful event increase 10 fold when you have people who know what they are doing.

I am always excited when someone tells me of their idea for an event.  As you know, I always preach that we need more events out there.  But just because you have the idea doesn’t mean you can make it happen. 

People are always calling me for event planning advice.  As usual I end up talking to them for 45 minutes and give out some free advice. I also see they are in serious need of expert planning and implementing.  This does mean spending some money.  You are not going to build your event by just asking for free advice.

Many of the daily readers of this blog are event & entertainment experts.  They understand what I am talking about.  Some of these readers are looking for new and exciting events to plan (myself included).  However, it takes money to make money.  If you have an idea for event, hire an expert consultant to help you.