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Ticket Pricing: Technology Replaces the Crystal Ball By Dave Brooks January 31, 2013 If you want to know what to charge and when, look to the data. How much are tickets to see What a Feeling: Flash Dance, the Musical at the Houston’s Hobby Center? Well, it depends when you buy them. Grab them when they first go on sale and you’ll get the best price; wait until the show is 70-percent sold, and the price goes up $5. Wait until it’s 75 percent and you’ll pay $10 more. In fact the price goes up $5 every time venue capacity increases five percent.
It’s a system used by David Greiss at Theater Under the Stars (TUTS), the presenter of What a Feeling… at the Hobby Center. Improvements in TUTS’s Paciolan-powered ticketing system have made it possible to automatically change ticket prices; in the past, they were adjusted manually—a huge headache for box office staff. Thanks to technology, it’s now possible to adjust prices in real time; high demand on sales can lead to big incremental revenue boosts—often in the six figures. At the same time, box-office professionals can collect valuable data at the point of sale [see Ticketing Is Getting Personal, enabling them to filter out the white noise, accurately predict future trends, and allocate marketing resources accordingly.
Tools like social media and data mining, using special algorhythms and formulas, have replaced intuition, gut feeling, and general records of past buying patterns to price new shows. Plus, data-driven results can present a more compelling argument for the board of directors.
“If history shows that the majority of tickets for this type of show move two weeks out from the performance, then there’s no need to worry about slow ticket sales four weeks out,” says Steven Roth of the Pricing Institute, an independent consultancy that offers arts organizations solutions for pricing their tickets.
“And the bulk of advertising can be spent when demand is strongest, as opposed to when consumers aren’t yet paying attention.”
Most importantly, data-based pricing helps organizations understand the perceived value of their different products with their consumers, and the difference between price and value—“if you argue value over price, you win more often then not,” Roth says.
Pricing Tips from an Expert
Dave Brooks is a writer based in Los Angeles, where he is managing editor of Venues Today. Copyright © 2024, Musical America |