Looking for a little #MondayMotivation? We’re pulling out past stories that are still just as relevant today. Here’s a pearl from Jim: Ticket Buyers Don't Care About Your Costs. That sounds a little harsh, but it’s essentially true. When it comes time to evaluate what they are willing to pay to see your show, ticket buyers do not care what you are spending to create that show. Cost is your problem. Price is theirs. This is a confusing subject for people, and my goal here is to...

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Looking for a little #WednesdayWisdom? We’re pulling out past stories that are still just as relevant today. Here’s a pearl from Jim: Superpowers, Part Three. Editor’s Note: For this series, Jim writes about our superpowers — the ones that we in the live entertainment business have — and their corresponding forms of kryptonite-like weaknesses. In the live entertainment business, we have superpowers. I’ve now explained two of them (in my posts, part one and part two). Sadly, as Superman knows, sometimes those superpowers...

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Happy #TBT. To celebrate, we’re sharing an oldie-but-goodie post from Jim: Let’s Get Marginal There’s a very common analytical error that producers of live entertainment make. It’s the kind of mistake that comes straight from human nature, and so in a way, it’s hard to blame theatre producers specifically for making it. Most of them never claimed to be quant jocks.  In fact, many of them actively protest that numbers give them the heebie jeebies. Fair enough, but the consequences of this mistake are...

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Happy #TBT. To celebrate, we’re sharing an oldie-but-goodie post from Jim: The Wisdom of the Soda Seller. Suppose I have a really simple business: I sell sodas on the beach from a little booth. (Actually, some days, that would sound kind of appealing.) My two expenses are the rent that I pay for the booth and the cost of the soda, which I pay to a wholesaler. And let’s say I pay the wholesaler $.50 per soda and sell it to you...

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Editor’s Note: For this series, Jim writes about our superpowers — the ones that we in the live entertainment business have — and their corresponding forms of kryptonite-like weaknesses. In the live entertainment business, we have superpowers. I’ve now explained two of them (in my posts, part one and part two). Sadly, as Superman knows, sometimes those superpowers come with superweaknesses. Today, we’ll cover the third and final (for now) pair of superpowers/superweaknesses. I saved this one for last! The third form...

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Happy #TBT. To celebrate, we’re sharing an oldie-but-goodie post from Jim: It's All About Value. You think I’m going to talk about pricing. That’s a very reasonable guess, but in this case, it’s wrong. Value is a ratio of what somebody puts in to what somebody gets out. If you paid $100,000 for a 5-year-old Hyundai, that’s a lot you’ve put in (in this case, money) for what you get out (a pretty mediocre and aging car). If you paid $150 for...

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Happy #TBT. To celebrate, we’re sharing an oldie-but-goodie post from Jim. He often talks about pricing (you can see examples here). Below are some ideas he posted in 2012. (Understandable) Wrong Answers to “Why Are Prices so High?” Via Ken, I read a piece in The Atlantic attempting to come to grips with higher prices for live entertainment, specifically Broadway, written by New York newcomer Derek Thompson. Like a lot of other people, he’s flummoxed by the seemingly unstoppable rise in...

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Live entertainment and arts organizations sometimes do “pay-what-you-want” performances, where ticket buyers can decide how much (if anything) they want to pay to see a show. As a marketer and someone who knows a lot about the industry, I’ve never been a big fan of this tactic. Most of the time, it’s either a cop-out on the question of actually figuring out pricing to achieve the organization’s goals, or it’s a half-assed attempt to create “accessibility,” which can be better...

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When people inside an organization either can’t or won’t confront the reality of their business model, bad things tend to happen. Symphonies and orchestras are having an increasingly hard time balancing their P&Ls. Here are two unfortunate but typical recent stories detailing these challengs, about the Green Bay Symphony Orchestra and the Delaware Symphony Orchestra. It’s because people don’t care about those genres anymore, while costs just keep going up, right? And with little to no government involvement and a donor base...

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How much money do unhappy customers cost U.S. businesses? A whooping $537,030,000,000 every year, according to the infographic below by Vision Critical, featured in Dorothy Tan's Design Taxi post. Click on the entire infographic for more interesting facts about the cost of unhappy customers.  Related: • Disney’s Price Increase: A Customer Service Move? • The Future of Customer Service? • Sometimes It’s the Little Things That Make a Big Difference

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