Your 'Financial Reality' has nothing to do with the price a customer will pay...
Hi-
One of the topics I’ve been pushing a lot lately is the idea of market focus.
I wrote something earlier this week about what that means to pricing decisions and marketing decisions that I’m going to share with y’all this morning.
Everton’s “financial reality” probably needs to reflect their fan’s perception of value:
Big Ideas:
The “financial reality” argument for price increases may not carry much weight with fans.
Neither will decreases in prices over a decade because customers don’t care about what you’ve done for us just what you are doing for us now.
Focusing on the improvements and the experience can help.
This is an interesting story because Everton is walking a pretty interesting line here. They are trying to build a new stadium, have been struggling to achieve success on the pitch, and need to generate revenues over the next few years to support construction and to be able to continue to offer up a competitive product for their fans.
The approach that Everton is taking right now is in the dangerous territory of product-focused marketing. And, it often doesn’t get you the success that you deserve.
Let me explain.
First, there are a couple of primary forms of orientations that businesses can take when they think about marketing and selling their products and services:
Sales Oriented: where all sales are good sales and no consideration is ever given to profitability, customer fit, or strategy. This happens a lot. It is the home of deep discounts.
Market Oriented: where you go out into the market and do some research to find out what your customers want, need, and value so that you can create or find products and services that fit their needs. This is my preferred method.
Product Oriented: this is where you get that saying, “build a better mousetrap…”. This often doesn’t work because you make guesses about what people want that are based on nothing but your own impressions of the situation.
When you look at what Everton is up against, they are building a new ground and they’ve had declining results and declining revenues over the last few years. They’ve moved to change some of this by bringing in players like James Rodriguez and a manager like Rafa Benitez, but without moving up the standings, they’ve hit a point where they are in a bit of stasis.
In building a new ground and offering a new mix of experiences, products, and spaces to their customers, the working assumption can often center on if we build a new ground we are sorted.
You can file that in the same bin with the idea that if you win everything will be fine.
We’ve seen both fail pretty regularly over the years.
The lesson to share today works no matter new stadium or not, winning or not, location or not.
First, you do your research.
I’ve beat on everyone here about doing your research for a long time now, but it comes up over and over as the area that needs the most attention because you often don’t recognize all of the things people love and hate about you.
The key is that you need to get into the market and find out what folks are thinking about you.
Talk to some of your most rabid fans, use the Google machine, conduct some surveys. Get into the mind of your fans.
It helps you make better decisions.
Why does this matter?
Because your customers don’t really care about what you need from them, they care about the value they are receiving. And, sometimes that value comes in the way that they are able to support the club.
Which might be a point in the favor of Everton, if played correctly.
Second, focus on that value that people get.
The great thing about a sports property/performing arts venue/etc. is that you almost always have a unique selling proposition that you can use as the foundation of your sales offering.
The challenge comes in the way that you frame this.
In looking at the situation in Everton, you can sell the promise of the future, and the history of the club. The tying together thing will be the work that you are doing now and the way that even as you build towards a brighter future, the present is pretty great.
Look at the way that the year or so before the Mets and Yankees closed out Shea Stadium and old Yankee Stadium the teams pointed to their history, celebrated the current teams, and used the current situation as a bridge to a brighter future.
The same situation can apply in Everton.
Finally, always remember, you aren’t your customer.
That’s marketing rule number one and it is important to keep in mind here. You aren’t the customer. What you think doesn’t matter and is often dangerous.
In looking at the situation in Everton, it is vital that the team step back and not think about the pressure that they are under or what they would want in this situation because neither idea matters. Instead, they have to spend a bit of time thinking through what their customers would want.
That’s all that ever matters, actually. Even if it is just a winning side.