When the tinder app was launched in the US back in 2012, there was zero trust in dating apps. Hard to start, harder to scale, and needing to be ‘hyper-local’ so that dates were a short drive away, tinder needed to find a way to spread the network beyond the first few hundred early adopters. So when co-founder, Justin Mateen’s, younger brother enrolled at the University of Southern California, Los Angeles, the firm funded an undergrad party with kegs of beer, etc, and signed up the students when they were in suitably high spirits. The tactic worked. From that one party, tinder rolled out the barrel across every University Campus in the US, and then internationally, and by October 2014 the platform was cupiding 12 million matches per day. It was a pretty basic formula: Booze PLUS students PLUS making-out EQUALS a marriage made in Heaven. But not every sector has it quite so easy. How can we in the other Business of Pleasure help producers and audiences find their dream match?
Whether consciously or instinctively, Live Entertainment Providers seek to profitably, and sustainably, supply the audiences they serve with experiences that:
Live long in the memory (i.e. transfer an attendee’s recall of that experience from short term memory to long term memory);
Generate a compulsion to repeat (i.e. revisit a production and/or brand);
Stimulate demand for auxiliary-sell, upsell and cross-sell opportunities;
Motivate the attendee to actively advocate the purchase of the experience across their personal and social networks.
Whether consciously or instinctively, Live Entertainment Purchasers seek to satisfy a variety of emotional and social needs and wants, including, in no particular order:
Nostalgia: This does not necessarily mean the return to a previously encountered experience, event, or place, as much as the desire to recapture, and re-experience a feeling; e.g. a visit to a new show might be driven by the wish to recapture the emotions evoked when first discovering an earlier production which had a powerful, or possibly transformational, impact on either an individual attendee, a couple, or larger social group.
Discovery: The desire to discover new experiences is an inbuilt adaptive (evolutionary) drive. It is often accompanied by subsidiary social payoff made possible when the attendee, in the role of early adopter, or pathfinder, shares their discovery with peers and networks.
Bonding: Some attendees are primarily drawn to purchase experiences in the hope that they will facilitate a bonding opportunity with their fellow attendees, be they partners (or prospective partners) family, friends, colleagues, etc. A hugely important subset of this grouping is the Special Occasion Market, because these purchases are less discretionary than other leisure budget decisions i.e. landmark events such as major birthdays, anniversaries and life events such as graduations or retirements require some expense, which may often be best spent in the form of a shared leisure experience.
Social Aspiration/Reinforcement: A wide range of attendees purchase live experiences in the belief that they denote, confer, or reinforce status within a particular social strata or grouping; from patronage of entertainment, cultural or arts events as exercises in in-group ‘badging’ to ‘tribal’ affiliations among sports and live music genres. A subset of this identity-driven grouping is comprised of attendees for whom the actual content of the experience/event is less important than the price it was secured for, ranging from deal-driven bargain-hunters at one end of the spectrum to attendees who take pleasure in exercising, and/or displaying, their purchasing power at the other.
Wellbeing: Research suggests that leisure experiences are increasingly being purchased on account of their perceived benefits to the subject’s mental, physical or emotional wellbeing.
In short, there are a number of distinct motivations, acting together in a hierarchy of priorities, which will influence prospective consumers’ discovery, research and purchase behaviours and which may also be reflected in the interactional and transactional characteristics of discreet or overlapping consumer groupings; personality-type, gender, age cohort, and social class.
In order to ensure optimal take up across these diverse spectra, the event provider/promoter and/or hosting venue should ideally seek to create an environment that shouts, rather than states, that the attendee has arrived at a place of physical and emotional safety, where their key purchase-decision priorities, i.e. the drivers behind the initial transaction, and any subsequent passion-points mapped in their online journey, previous purchases or survey responses, promises to be satisfied beyond their expectations, whilst simultaneously providing amelioration, or mitigations, for any potential pain-points also indicated.
This can only be achieved by providing all engaged teams, at every level of the organisation, with the culture, and resources, to pursue each attendee/purchaser as a highly connected representative of a commercially significant segment, which is itself intrinsically linked with, and interacting with, the overall audience mix required to achieve sustainable profitability across the desired/anticipated season or run. In short, this means maintaining a sustained, sustainable and agile focus on the perpetually moving (and evolving) audience ecosystem whose fluctuations, in both taxonomy and trajectory, may be anticipated, and commercially exploited, with greater or lesser success, depending on the organisation’s fluency, consistency and creativity, in connecting observable behaviours and trends with the event/experience’s commercial decisions and communications.
In terms of an organisation’s sales and marketing strategy, this should seek to anticipate, weight and exploit movements in the mix of identified variables influencing the trading environment by performance year, month and week. While being perpetually on the look-out for new and emerging factors/behaviours to incorporate in the modelling. While most venues generally have approximate catchment areas, those serving destination cities, such as London’s West End, can potentially reach national and international audiences. This introduces the need to understand a far greater range of variables month-to-month, and, as ever, the sales and marketing reach is
ultimately restricted by corporate culture, data-comprehension, marketing resource/channels (In-House, Partner and Third Party) and always, available time ..even if it’s only the time required to train the organisation’s AI to ferret out trends promptly, and accurately, in order to produce actionable insights.
In summary, the total potential source market spectrum for a production/event/experience is finely gradated from ‘best prospects’ to ‘adjacent users,’ and the challenge is always to optimally, cost-effectively and/or strategically, develop natural audience(s) i.e. those for whom the perceived content is immediately relevant, whilst identifying, evaluating and removing the barriers to purchase from all significantly remunerative and/or strategically important adjacent geographic, demographic and psychographic prospect segments, by communicating benefits which extend the context in which the prospective experience is perceived, and thereby acquire significant relevance to those segments.
Or in tinder terms… highly-targeted promiscuity makes the Advance grow stronger.
*For the full skinny on the tinder back-story read Andrew Chen’s game-changing ‘The Cold Start Problem’
Copyright David Thomas 2024
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
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