It’s That Time Of Year Again

Well…were now into the holiday shopping season.  We just had “Black Friday”, “Small Business Saturday” and “Cyber Monday”.  As a marketer of tickets, did you participate in the fun? If you didn’t, you should have.

For some odd reason, we in the live entertainment business don’t think of ourselves as retail.  We put ourselves in a different category.  But we are retail.  We should be marketing our tickets with the same gusto that the big box retailers do over the holiday shopping season. I do see some venues and shows offering holiday specials but not at the level of retailers.

It’s more than “makes a great holiday gift” inserted in a newspaper ad.  There should be Black Friday mega deals.  We should be offering Cyber Monday deals.  AMEX was behind Small Biz Saturday.  They do a lot with the ticket selling world.  Why not have them do something big for us?

In our business, we don’t like to discount tickets.  Too many pieces of the pie to dish out. But if we planned ahead for the holiday season we could do the big discounting now and maybe not as much later.  If you are a venue, you know most of the upcoming year’s schedule.  Think of yourself as a “big box store”. Why not offer deep discounts for the first holiday shopping weekend and then stop.   Think about the fact you could sell tickets now for a show that doesn’t go on sale until May.  Any tickets you sell now are less that need to be marketed later.  Think of the discounts as part of the marketing budget.

In our business, we all like to create hype and excitement.  Isn’t that the fuel behind the holiday shopping season?

Post-Holiday Marketing Notes

Brand Packaging

Over the holiday weekend I went to Patriot Place.  For those not from the Boston area this is the new shopping and entertainment complex that surrounds Gillette Stadium (home of the New England Patriots).   The Kraft family built this very cool place to create a year round money making machine.  It reminds me a little of Universal’s City Walk or Downtown Disney.  We went Friday morning between hockey games that my daughter was playing in.  The place has big brand name stores, restaurants, movie theater, plenty of free parking, and even a live event place that is kind of like House of Blues.  One really important item was missing from this, people.  This was Black Friday (biggest shopping day of the year) and the stores were empty except for the Bass Pro Shop.  That was packed. But lets be honest they are an attraction.  Let’s call it the “Red Neck Disney”.  Very cool, interactive and great for the kids.  I believe the reason the rest of Patriot Place was quiet was lack of marketing.  I did see one radio station setting up for what was a mid-day promotion.  A place this size needs more then one radio station to make it work.

More Texting

I noticed that more and more marketers are using mobile text messages as a marketing tool.  I saw both TV and newspaper ads asking for customers to text them to receive something “free”.  This is a good start but how do we take this to the next level?

See I Told You

The numbers are in from Friday and people did spend money at the stores.  Retailers dropped their prices and their pants and the customers came in.  People do need to shop for the holidays.  They want the holidays to be an escape from all the bad news out there.  This leads me to the next topic.

Give The People What They Want

The biggest selling items were the ones with the best prices and the items that consumers want.  As event and entertainment marketers we should take a lesson from this.  Put together an event or show that our customers want and give it to them at a reasonable price.  I know we can do it so let’s try.

Cyber Monday

Today is what is now called Cyber Monday.  This is the biggest online shopping day of the year.  You know which group dropped the ball again this year?  How about the event and entertainment business?  I have already written in the past about marketing tickets as holiday gifts.  How many promoters of events marketed their products around today?  Don’t most ticket sales happen online?  Wouldn’t it be smart to market some shows with even a (God forbid) discount today?  Ticketmaster does most of their business over the net.  Today should be a “really” big day.  If I did Ticketmaster’s marketing I would have had a whole marketing campaign around buying tickets today.