Flux's Ticket Discount Deals
Earlier in January, Kelly O'Donnell forward us a link to Peculiar Works' co-founder Barry Rowell's blog, A Strange Interlude (I wonder if it is named for one of Eugene O'Neill's stranger plays which I secretly adore and dream of staging), which featured a look at Flux's discount ticket deals and made all of our days.
Flux has spent in an inordinate amount of time arguing out the philosophy behind these deals, and it is really gratifying to see that recognized. Sometimes, you wonder if anyone notices, so Barry, thank you for noticing.
The philosophy is not new: basically, it says if you commit to our work ahead of time, during that pivotal 1st or 2nd week, we'll discount our tickets as much as possible out of gratitude. As Barry notes, it's currently not much, but the philosophy behind it is sincere; and because of it, we NEVER offer a better discount than that 1st week discount, even if a poorly selling night sorely tempts us to do so.
It's about building trust in relationships, and it's why recent theories about using demand based pricing in ticket sales strikes me as singularly unwise for NFP institutions. And it reinforces my belief that unless you are lucky enough to have an Adam Thurman leading your marketing, the risks of a traditional, specialist org structure can lead to strategies coming before relationships.
It's been gratifying in our intensified core values conversations this past month that all of our membership has been naturally putting the audience as a partner in the conversation; without setting out to do it, the way we work has organically bred that priority in our bones. We need to hold fast to it, go further with it, and I look forward to sharing the fruits of those conversations soon.
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Hi Gus,
Interesting post. Thanks for sharing. Also, thanks for introducing me to Adam Thurman's blog, which strangely, I did not know about! I think it's important to make the conversation about ticket pricing and ticket discounts transparent. I think that your consistency has probably helped you too. The Anthro's tried something slightly different this time - though we still offered advance sales discounts and limited our during the run discounts to one day (Superbowl Sunday!) - we also changed our pricing strategy. Thus, Fridays were always 2-for-1. Thursdays were always $10. Have you ever experimented with different pricing strategies? And if so, did you see positive or negative results?
Thanks,
Melissa