How Not to Discount, Part 4

(For those of you tuning in a bit late, here are parts 1, 2, and 3.)

This one’s a little more personal, and if you’re doing this, well, I am still more interesting in changing what you’re doing than in scorning you for doing it, but I do have to ask, is this really how you’d like to be?

The fourth way that you shouldn’t do discounting is to do it in such a way that it’s designed to punish the people buying your discount tickets.  This is done by, for example, putting them in the last row of the house when other sections are available, making them wait to be seated after the ‘regular’ patrons have been seated, or otherwise creating a little reminder that they’re getting less because they paid less.

Imagine if the airlines did that to you.  Did you fly full fare the last time you went?  Did you pay rack rate last time you stayed at a hotel?  If you didn’t, did the hotel go out of its way to put you in a room right next to a busy elevator?  Did the airline make you wait until everyone else had boarded before letting you on or telling you that you couldn’t use the overhead bins?

Of course, they didn’t, and you’d have been outraged if they did.  After all, if they didn’t want to sell you a ticket at that price, they shouldn’t have sold you a ticket at that price.

Here’s why it’s personal.  I have one million customers, and every now and then, something like this happens at a venue to which we’ve sold tickets.  It makes me mad because we’re working our butts off to get people into shows (quite successfully, I might add) and then somebody abuses them.  Once again, this is a real amateur move.  When I hear about it (and it’s very rare indeed that it happens), I know we’re dealing with a second-rate venue.

Why do I say this?

Let’s go back to something I said: a discount buyer, if you’re doing it well, is a person sampling your product, a person opening themselves up to the possibility of a long, beautiful relationship with your organization.  Put differently, this is the best shot you’re ever going to get to impress them.

And you’ve chosen to make the petty and profitless point  that you think these patrons are scum.  My question to you is this: what personal issues are you working out by treating customers like this?

Now, if you’re doing discounting badly (which organizations like this probably are), you’ve basically been recycling your full price customers into discounts for years and years and you’re tired of it.  By punishing them, you figure you’re showing them the error of their ways and they’ll come back to the full price fold.  I’ll admit that this is slightly less psychotic because it’s at least consistent: you’ve been making a mistake for a long time and now you’re trying to fix it by making another, equal and opposite mistake.

It seems obvious to me, but let’s say it anyway.  This business of live entertainment isn’t one that should be arrogant about mistreating patrons.  Who are we, Apple?  There’s a war in the minds of entertainment-goers right now that the live entertainment industry could be winning because we’ve got what people want: a rich, real, kinetic, varied, exciting product that truly changes people’s lives for the better.  But we could lose that war because the ushers have been told that the people in the balcony are cheapskates because they paid $35 for a ticket instead of $70.

If you don’t want to sell a ticket at a discount, don’t.  If you do sell a ticket at a discount, treat the buyer like every other buyer.  It’s not just a question of not being a jerk; it’s a question of whether you’re going to get any long-term value out of your discounting practices.  Abuse people, and I can tell you, the answer is no.  Treat their visit as a chance to draw them into your core audience, and the answer has a much higher chance of being yes.