When my kids were little and tele-marketing was all the dinner time rage, I used to put them on the phone with the hardiest of cold callers. I thought of it as fair play; they were interrupting my family team and my dinner for some unwanted spiel about credit cards, home loans, timeshares, or other bad uses of my money (looking back: leading indicator of today’s messes!). Instead, they got a 3-year old who asked them what their favorite color was, what they were wearing, if they liked hockey (that would have been Lil’Bubba) and other questions, in a true test of wills to see who would hang up first.
Mid-afternoon today I got a call (on the home line, no less) from the NJ Devils asking me if there were any Devils fans at home. Mistake. They got the maturity-equivalent of the little kid on the line, and instead of buying from them, I sold:
Realize that I am part of a Devils season ticket group. Very, very, few fans own their season tickets outright these days; at $3,600 per seat downstairs that’s a lot of scratch for anyone. We tend to share. Make sure you (a) realize this and (b) perhaps extend the benefits of season ticket holders to entire groups, not just the named account holders. Face it — if our group got an extra four “Skate with the Devils” passes, we might take more tickets, or involve more people in our group resulting in increased demand for tickets.
Follow the Caps lead and start selling tickets for $10 as soon as the puck drops on game night. When you know what the unsold inventory is, let people know via Facebook, SMS or email - basically, you sign up for a private marketing channel and you get access to the heavily discounted seats. It’s a brilliant plan that Leonsis runs in the Unnamed Telco Center - those seats are not generating a single dollar of revenue unsold, so $10 (or $5 or $1) is pure incremental profit. Plus nobody goes to the game without hitting the concession stand. What surprised me about the caller is that he had no idea - don’t the Devils marketing guys read The Hockey News or ESPN: The Magazine? That’s how I found out about these butt-in-seat vehicles. Nobody who is on the fence about going to the Rock is going to pay nearly $200 for a pair of tickets, but for $20, you’d take the train, arrive a few minutes late when the beer line is de minimus, and have a fun night.
Pay attention to the bloggers. Do something for the local fan base; give us access to the team, the building, the club, your thinking, the prospect list, the trade rumor mill, Lou’s spreadsheets, Elias’ cell phone numbers, and maybe some game-used gear. Just kidding about some of that list (who wants spreadsheets?) — but do something to reach out to the people who are helping to create a buzz around the Devils.
To quote the Gen Y employees trying shake up NASA, everything you know about community, demand creation, marketing, distribution and audience is wrong. Today’s hockey fans aren’t the same ones who grew up watching games on WOR or WPIX (thankfully, because most of them became Rangers fans, for the much-proffered reason that “they were on TV.” If Gilligan and the Skipper played hockey, Rangers fans would follow them, too). We get our news, data and updates online. We have friends we haven’t met or heard, but enjoy their self-published voices. We join groups because they seem like a good idea, even though only one in ten has some utility once the first laugh has damped down.
Now I’m waiting for the second call from the Rock: you obviously know where to find me.
This entry was posted
on Monday, November 17th, 2008 at 5:06 pm and is filed under Hockey, Writing.
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