Cheaper Tickets and Cheaper Fees Seem Back to Front?
23 August, 2010 at 11:33 am Tim Roberts ARTS Australia Leave a comment
The mistaken commodity emphasis of much of the discussion regarding ticketing and its inherent preoccupation with ticket price and fees ignores the rest of the marketing tools available to artists. But more importantly, to presume price is the one and only variable is to diminish their creative asset and discount their other great asset their relationship with fans and the impact of loyalty.
A case in point is this article: Artists Realizing It’s Time To Offer Cheaper Concert Tickets Directly, And To Get Rid Of Annoying Fees
Again as stated previously, I am all for artists and event owners dealing directly with the fans that they have a relationship with, rather than being forced to use third party agents. It is not great lightbulb moment as these articles seem to present. Other industries have been leading the way for a while now with disaggregation and removing middlemen from the equation by opening the channels for customers to deal directly with them.
The growth and widespread adoption of the Internet has enabled a great variety of online channels and this is only growing all the time with the current blooms in the mobile and social media areas. All these developments are doing the same thing, increasing availability and access.
So we need to move on from a preoccupation with price and, yes, get rid of fees for the inconvenience of dealing through an agent and open up channels direct to the artist and event owner. We need to focus upon maximising the benefit of these technological enhancements and develop relationships directly with consumers and fans. we now have the tools, capacity and we just have to add the capability and intent to develop one to one relationships with our constituents.
Lets look at the larger demand equation, rather just focussing on price and arguing over the efficiency of using agents to deal with your customers and fans.
As Drucker said “Efficiency is doing things right; effectiveness is doing the right things.”
Paraphrasing Drucker, no amount of efficiency will make up for a lack of effectiveness. So no surprise it is more important to be doing the right thing . “There is nothing so useless as doing efficiently that which should not be done at all.”
Venue Exclusive Ticketing Contracts that force the outsourcing customer contact to third party agencies is no longer the right thing to do.
Entry filed under: Arts Marketing, audience development, CRM, Loyalty, Online, Web 2.0. Tags: Arts Marketing, audience development, CRM, Online, price, Venue Exclusive Contracts, Web 2.0.
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