By Jim McCarthy Jun 16, 2010 7 comments

“Discounting Silliness” Presentation Now Live

As promised, here’s a recreation of the presentation we gave at EAMC last week in Chicago.  It’s a quick recap of some of the points I made in the “How Not To Discount” series.  Please take a look and pass it around, though you might want to click on the little ‘expand’ button in the bottom right as the player is quite small for some reason.  (BYOSS-Bring Your Own Silly String.)

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7 Comments

  • Dennis Swayne
    June 17th, 2010

    Sandy Yen shared this with me and I found this to be quite helpful & informative! Thank you for sharing & posting! I’ll look forward to the more that will follow.

  • Christian Wolf
    June 17th, 2010

    Some very valid points. However, I question your reasoning for discounting early. Like a lot of other venues I know, I wait until a couple of weeks out before I put a show on Goldstar because I want to know how it will sell to see if I need to discount. My thinking is that by offering discounts to all my shows or by discounting early, I could potentially lose full priced patrons as they will simply wait and buy on Goldstar if they know all my shows are there.
    Last season I listed maybe 5 out of 28 shows on Goldstar and feel confident that I have added some potential full price patrons to my list. Simply because they now know the venue and the quality of the experience, but they also know if they want a seat and it doesn’t show up on Goldstar, they will need to pay full price.

  • Jim McCarthy
    June 17th, 2010

    Christian, I don’t entirely disagree with your point about starting a couple weeks out. I’m most especially against discounting in the last few days, because at that point, you’ve really missed the opportunity.

    Also, what I see is the tendency for venues to dramatically exaggerate the potential “losses” from full price patrons waiting for a show to appear on Goldstar and at the same time, dramatically underestimating the need to increase the number of people who know about your show in the first place.

    Still, I don’t think I’m in major disagreement with you here. A couple weeks is often enough.

  • Gary Lamb
    June 17th, 2010

    Thanks… preaching to the choir. The only thing that is not addressed is the fact that Goldstar has devotees who only go to a Goldstar event… so you are also creating audiences who may never pay full price again… and raising our ticket prices also raises our overhead as what we pay our union members is directly related to the price of tickets to our shows… not the price per seat. I would love to talk with you regarding the little guy (which we are) and how Goldstar might be able to better serve us.

  • Jim McCarthy
    June 17th, 2010

    Thanks, Gary. I feel your pain on the Union thing, and in that case, the point about not having a marginal cost on a ticket isn’t entirely true. It’s a really unfortunate business model for those for whom it’s true, but I know it is reality.

    On the other point, (that Goldstar people only go to Goldstar events), it doesn’t tend to be true. Most people who go out a lot through Goldstar go out even more through sources other than Goldstar, based on the data we’ve seen.

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