The Virtual Terrace • Challenge Cup 2020
Donnyman wrote:
Your a very astute gentleman and nobody can argue sensibly with your analysis, all too often the stock tedious answer to improving paying attendances is "marketing, we need more marketing". The only problem with that is if you spend £10,000 more on the marketing and sell £5,000 worth of tickets more than you would have sold it's creates a negative result, you end up £5,000 out of pocket. Clearly making the event more attractive to potential paying attendees is the solution.
That stock tedious answer "Marketing" is to me insulting to the marketing managers of the Superleague clubs, it's not as if they haven't found solutions at some points. Keighleys cougarmania followed by Bullmania worked for a significant time, but all the extra razzamatazz without the extra Rugby league content eventually became boring. Having said that my ticket to the big season opener covers the content of two Superleague games, the debut of a Canadian side (yes I know but it will look good to people on a billboard) and the debut of one of Rugby's greatest. All in a wonderful new stadium with great facilities. It will be interesting to see if it sells out, but even if it does we must remember Mr. Argyle will be standing the major revenue loss of a 9,000 home crowd??? (Have I got this right?)
It is clearly a very difficult thing to do to make an event more attractive without increasing the costs/losses of staging it and thus reducing the profits??
I think the biggest mistake people make in that scenario is that they accuse "marketing" with "advertising". The say things like "I was in <insert name of city hosting RL event> and I didn't see any posters". That's not a failure of marketing - it's a failure of advertising.
Advertising is the big that shouts about what you've got. Marketing is the bit that works out whether you're shouting about the right thing, and determines how you adapt it to make it something that people want to (and can) buy. Marketing is the thing that Apple uses to convice people that they need a new phone that they never realised they needed. Advertising is the thing they use to tell them when to start camping outside the shop.
So in many cases, the point of failure is in the marketing. Not because the game isn't telling people about RL, but because it isn't understanding who it's telling and what they actually want. Many RL events are not very marketable products for a wide spectrum of people - they just don't appeal to people outside the core base and that's why events like Magic and Bash cannibalise the CC Final.
That's what I mean when I say that RL cannot 'advertise' its way out the problems it has got itself into. It can't fix this issue by just yelling "TGG" at people and making out that the people who can't see that are the ones that are wrong. You can't force people to like RL, but you can adapt it to make it something that more people will like.
If that makes the cost of doing business more expensive, then that's the modern reality that we're in.
Statistics: Posted by bramleyrhino — Mon Dec 02, 2019 1:42 pm — Replies 93 — Views 4048