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Illinois Moves To Combat Deceptive Ticketing Practices

by:

Joe Patti

About a year ago I had mentioned that states had begun creating legislation to combat problematic ticket resale practices given that legislation on the federal level was either slow to emerge or viewed as insufficient.

Recently, Illinois had joined the effort. In particular, they wanted to address the problem of speculative ticket sales:

“Every day, patrons are being sold what they believe are valid tickets, when, in reality, they are only paying for a chance that someone may be able to secure a seat,” said John Mangum, Lyric’s general director, who was also joined by leaders of The Auditorium and Harris Theater.

“This practice leads to confusion, frustration, and what many in our field now call ‘front-gate heartbreak,’ when audiences arrive at a performance only to learn that they do not actually have a valid admission ticket.”

Source

In some cases, the seats people purchase don’t exist either. The pavilion in which the Ravinia Festival occurs recently completed a renovation that changed their seating chart. However, the entities masquerading as the Festival’s ticket sales site are still selling tickets based on the old map which includes tickets that no longer exist.

I have run into the same issue at two venues for which I worked for the same reason. For a year or two after a renovation people show up with tickets for seats that no longer exist. It can be difficult to suppress a grimace and remain optimistic as you tell people they have been scammed and try to suggest options.

The story mentions that the Lyric Opera sets seats aside for those who arrive with fake tickets so they can see the show. But say this practice results in losses of $2500 to $5000. I am not clear if these losses are due to providing them seats at no cost rather than making them pay on top of what they already paid the scammer. If they feel the need to hold tickets aside that may mean the performances are well-attended and they are forgoing advance sales revenue and losing out when those tickets remain unused the day of the performance.

Arts in an Age of Technology, Government Relations, Legal Topics

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You Can’t Scale Connection

by:

Joe Patti

There was an article on the FastCompany website talking about how companies can’t expect to scale customer connection. It needs to happen on a individualize basis through a relatively painstaken process rather than via high volume communication channels.

The industry’s current obsession with scaling connection misses the point. When brands treat connection like a growth metric, it’s a sign the audience has become abstract. You earn connection at the individual level when the right brand leverages the right voice for the right audience—the same way relationships work in real life.

Source

This made me think of a mini case study regarding the efforts of the New Bedford Symphony (NBS) Ruth Hartt has been sharing via her newsletter and LinkedIn posts. Hartt relates how NBS learned about what motivated their patrons by speaking and surveying them directly rather than making assumptions about them based on demographic data.

She says that people can feel uncomfortable collecting data in this manner because you end up having some very personal conversations with audience members.

What NBS has done is create a handful of personalized landing pages that align with audience motivations (i.e. seeking to relax/recharge, learn something new/expand horizons, spend time with family and friends). They sent emails that connected people to personalized landing pages that best aligned with their desired outcomes.

For the last 14 weeks NBS has been doing a little experiment sending personalized emails to those they surveyed and general non-personalized emails about concerts to the rest of their mailing list. The personalized emails have been out performing the non-personalized ones handily.

Hartt says it is the fact the marketing messaging is focused on the customer needs and interests rather than on the organization or the work being performed that makes the difference.

Because the instinct in arts marketing is to make the product do all the work upfront:

Here’s the composer.

Here’s the soloist.

Here’s the repertoire.

Here’s the conductor.

Please care.

But in this pilot, the stronger path was different. Start with the patron’s need. Then let the concert become the answer.

[…]

“Don’t talk about the concert” is not the lesson here. The lesson is: Relevance comes first. The product comes second.

Source

Audience Relations, Building Public Will For Arts And Culture, Marketing/PR

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Focus On What Gets You 5/5

by:

Joe Patti

According to a piece in Harvard Business Review about what companies can learn from their biggest fans, apparently only the highest levels of satisfaction will result in an increase of productivity and revenue and reverse downward trends. This is apparently true for both customers and employees

According to the article author, Marcus Buckingham, the wrong way to turn around a problematic environment whether it be customer or employee disengagement/dissatisfaction isn’t to fix what is broken but rather to invest more effort into the organization’s strengths. And those strengths are only found within the areas identified as extremely positive experiences.

Marketing research consistently shows that incentives and loyalty perks produce short-term transaction spikes but no increase in lifetime customer value…

[….]

To truly move people toward positive outcomes, leaders must pay attention to what I call “extreme positive experiences”—which make employees speak with genuine passion about their work and customers not just prefer but love a product or service—and then operationalize what’s working in those experiences. 

Source

This obviously makes sense but what I was really surprised to learn is that the experience has to indeed be rated as extremely positive to effect the sought for change. Only 5/5 is effective, 4/5 won’t do. Apparently combining the 4s and 5s results to arrive at a satisfaction score doesn’t provide an accurate measure. People cram more satisfaction between 4 and 5 than 3 and 4.

Someone who gives a 5 out of 5 rating to something has an altogether different experience of that thing than someone who rates it a 4 does. (That’s why leaders should never combine 4 and 5 ratings into a single “percent favorable” bucket when trying to understand what experiences to design for employees or customers; it’s also why the Net Promoter Score, which combines the top two scores on the scale, is a problematic metric.)

Source

Buckingham cites the example of Kroger supermarkets when rival Publix supermarket chain was opening stores in the Cincinnati market. Based on feedback from customers, Kroger redoubled their efforts to have their employees focus on adding and improving personal interactions with customers, including training them to take groceries to shoppers’ cars and load them safely.

After surveying employees about things that improved their satisfaction, they ended up identifying people who really enjoyed and were invested in cleaning. Kroger management arranged things so that those people were protected in doing that work. In other words, they created an environment and process where these employees were not interrupted or reassigned from performing this work.

I should note Buckingham mentioned he consults for Kroger. He may not be entirely unbiased in his account of their success. On the other hand, Kroger is headquartered in Cincinnati so any loss of market share to Publix on their home turf would be an assault on their pride. They were likely highly motivated to achieve great results.

It seems they did. Leaning into those things that rated highly with both employees and customers, they saw some positive results. Their loss of business to Publix was reduced to 48% of what they projected and some of the stores in the Cincinnati-Dayton district had revenue increases.

Perhaps even more important was the improvement in job satisfaction for employees.

 In the months following their introduction, team engagement scores increased seven points, and associate turnover dropped by 10.9%. Customers’ ratings of store cleanliness increased by 28.9 points, and their ratings of associate friendliness in the stores jumped 45 points, leading to a 4.5% increase in overall customer satisfaction.

Source

Audience Relations, Building Public Will For Arts And Culture, Leadership, Management Philosophy, Marketing/PR

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Using Your Imagination Is The Test

by:

Joe Patti

Last week I heard a news story about the Department of Education moving to require colleges and universities to provide graduates are better off with a degree than a high school diploma or risk losing their funding.

I thought back to the survey years ago where corporate CEOs said that the top skill new hires needed to move their companies forward is creativity.

To me the increased push toward only granting degrees for a unitarian result measured in wages represented a disconnect between the federal government and the stated needs of corporations.

Though granted, that survey was about a decade ago and now many companies are laying people off in favor of AI. It should be no surprise to anyone that short term profit tops long term corporate goals.

Seth Godin addressed this to a degree in a post he made in early March where he said society is increasingly focused on the question, “Will This Be On The Test?” vs. “What If..”.

He says exercising creativity and imagination is actually harder work than people credit.

Imagination is a skill and it takes effort.

It’s not useful to say, “I’m not imaginative.”

It’s more accurate to realize that we might not care enough to get good at it, or to put in the effort it takes.

As tasks continue to be automated, the hard work of imagination is worth investing effort in.

Source

creativity

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Butts In The Seats by Joe Patti is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.
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