2 Ideas I was working on this week...

Two quick ideas that I’ve been playing with this week.

What do you make of them?

Dave

I. Price is based on two factors:

• Awareness

• Perceived Value

This graph is something I’ve pulled out with a few clients recently.

You can make a lot of decisions on pricing, marketing, and positioning by knowing where you are on the graph.

Let me explain the labels for you really quickly:

• High/High: “The World is Your Oyster”. You have strong brand awareness, brand associations, high perceived value. This is the Heatles, Hamilton on Broadway for years, or Pearl Jam at the Garden last year.

• High Awareness/Low Perceived Value: “Value Brand”. This can be a plus or a minus, depending on what you are attempting to achieve with your offering. This is stuff you can think of as it “does a job” like store brands.

• High Value/Low Awareness: “Growth potential”. You might be “a best kept secret.” You don’t want to get stuck here for too long.

• Low/Low: Commodity. This is where too many tickets get stuck now. People might know a show is going on or a game happens in town, but they don’t know when or don’t care to look to see if they might want to go. Look at a lot of the pictures of empty baseball stadiums to start the season, that’s the situation here. If you are stuck here, you have to get out ASAP. You are about to hit a death spiral.

Where do you think your tickets and your business fall on this scale?

Bonus: You can influence both of these variables if you want to.

What do you think of my drawings? Helpful? Useful?

Let me know.

II. Strategy isn’t what you say…it is what you do:

Actions speak louder than words.

Think about it like this: You are always doing strategy, even if you don’t realize it.

The worst strategic practitioners, run around like chickens with their head cut off.

Strategy doesn’t mean you’ll be inflexible. Strategy means you’ll be flexible within a framework of understanding what success looks like.

Or, if the destination changes, you realize that something has changed and you must act differently.

Why does this happen? Strategy as a term has been thrown around so regularly now that it is almost meaningless. It is in the vein of people throwing around marketing and advertising like they are the same thing.

My working definition of strategy: a process that helps a business create the best environment for success.

How do I look at strategy: I look at it through the question: “Why are some organizations succeeding while others are failing?”

Why do you need it? Even if y’all are in huge organizations, you don’t have the resources to throw around willy nilly.

Everyone needs strategy.

Here’s my belief: the smaller the organization, the more important the strategic choice is.

Because you don’t have the money, time, or resources to try and go after the entire market.