3 Lessons From My Week Following Super Bowl Ticket Prices!
Hey!
Happy Super Bowl Sunday!
I’ve been tracking the Super Bowl ticket prices this week as an exercise to look at demand generation and pricing.
If you are curious about my week watching Super Bowl prices, you can find my thoughts and observations from the week here.
Since the Super Bowl is a big television event in the US and I’ve been following the prices and the dance between price and demand, that I’d spend a few moments talking about the Super Bowl.
First, the overall gist of my week following the Super Bowl was that the research that showed that around 80% of Americans are reluctant to join crowds and go to events until there was a widely distributed vaccine was still holding true despite the feeling of “pandemic fatigue” that folks are mentioning and several articles have talked about.
Second, the vibrancy of the Super Bowl ticket market, even when the Buccanneers are in the game in their own town, wasn’t very strong. Tickets were sitting there and the prices dropped dramatically from their high when the game was first settled.
Third, looking at Google Trends, the search volume for the Super Bowl this year is down about 75% from last year and the lowest as far back as I could track it on Google Trends.
What lessons can we learn?
1. We have to trust our research: A lot of the conversations I’m having with folks in on the corporate side of things is that they have had their marketing budgets cut back or if they are stable, they are being scrutinized in ways that they weren’t before the pandemic.
But when I talk with some folks on the ticket side, they are almost always operating under the assumption that things are going to just snap back to the way things were before the pandemic with no delay as soon as tickets are on-sale.
Much of the research we can do now isn’t going to be relevant after the pandemic, but we can learn a lot about what folks are dealing with, thinking, and feeling right now.
In general, research is your friend when it comes to making decisions and if you find yourself listening to a marketer talking about “feeling” and “thinking” without data and research that backs it up…be very careful.
2. You can’t assume demand: One of the issues I talked about above was the assumption that people are just going to come back like nothing happened.
You can’t make assumptions about anything, especially now.
We are in a situation where we don’t have a playbook for what we are dealing with. We have learned some workarounds and some ways to deal with the pandemic, but we are still making things up as we go along.
This is something we are getting through and not something we are going to always be dealing with.
But we do have a playbook for dealing with recessions or recovery from economic shock.
And, when that time comes, the first thing we are going to do is research to see where people are because we are going to have to deal with an economic challenge, a psychological challenge, and the remnants of the healthcare crisis.
All of this means, don’t assume demand.
Do your research, segment, target, and position.
3. Be prepared for change: The Super Bowl search data shows that people’s tastes can change and change radically by external events.
Let’s hope we don’t mean another pandemic, but external events can create change.
When I went to Australia to speak at the Ticketing Professionals Conference in November 2019, I talked about change and the fact that we don’t get to pick whether or not things are going to change, but we can manage how we deal with change.
As we move forward, keep the idea of managing change in your mind so that you don’t get caught flatfooted, waiting for things to snap back or act the way that they always do, you have to be prepared for change and embrace it.
With that out of the way, I think I’m going to placing my bet with the boy on Kansas City, but really I’m looking forward to the queso that we are going to make for the game!
See you next week!
Dave