Prince of Denmark, Surrey Ben

Before this turned into a slanging match for a couple of pages, I beleive this is what we were getting at.

If at least two stands are open, why not dedicate one entirely to away support? This way all their fans can be together, while Quins fans would usually fill the Etihad stand.

SKY is happy
No extra costs
Potential extra revenue

I was (and still may) come this weekend, but I will not be able to bring extra friends with me due to lack of seats at the £15 price. Last season I came paid £10 and sat in a great position. In the off season I worked on my circle of friends and managed to convinced them to come with me.

This season I have done my bit and brought 9 friends with me to games. Some came to Manly, the others Wigan and I missed the Wire game as I was out of town.

The Wigan game left a bad taste in the 4 friends mouths who came due to sitting in row 2 while thousands of seats were left unoccupied (I turned up when gates opened). I'm stuggling to get those guys to return.

This week I have 3 lined up (some came to manly), with potential for another 2-3. However, they would most likely not attend if tickets are £25 (especially as tickets for Manly were $12 through TNT on half way). They would rather plow that extra 10-20 quid through the bar and catering. If all the £15 tickets are nearly gone, what is this saying about our market? Usually the first seats to go are the premium ones, however most people beleive our product is only worth £15 and are willing to pay that much for it.

This is just my experience, as a club that is trying to grow we are not doing a great job to encourage new fans through the game day experience. Sure we have a great bar, but essentially you are paying to watch the game of footy, and I dont want to sit in a seat that is below the signage line.

Yep, I thought the whole point was only the East Stand would be open but that is not the case in practice.

I have no idea what the answer is but a friend I was going to bring along probably won't be coming now for similar reasons to those cited above. It may be there is no better answer but it would seem to be worth the club looking at this one.

Incidentally re Hindyscrack comment about friends not being happy at being stuck in Row 2 when thousands of seats were empty. I remember writing to Nic Cartwright once asking why a group of my friends had been allocated tickets behind the try line at Griffin Park when 95% of the next two blocks were empty for that game. (They moved into better seats strangely enough.) I thought at the time it would have been a pretty disastrous first impression on a group of first timers if I hadn't been with them. Nic never replied, good to know we have enough fans we can afford to hack off first timers eh.

Imagine if We do not get this sorted, the crowd for a Thursday night against a french side. Exactly. Please Quins start switching on.

I would suggest forwarding this thread and the thoughts contained to the club. Alas, I am still waiting for a reply to the last e-mail I sent.

You dont need to, i know for a fact they keep their eye on this forum. I had to kick Wire fans out of my season ticket seat the other week, because they wanted to sit near some other Wire fans who were in my block as there was no room in their side to all sit together. Ridiculous in a stadium of 12000 capacity and only 3500 in attendance.

Do the relevant people who actually have the authority to make a decision read it though?

Yeah Gutterfax's real name is Mr. D. Hughes.

We are well and truly DOOMED

I knew that double-barrelled name was too ridiculous to be real

Oh believe me....it's 500 years + real, you peasant!

Only if you measure the "financial sense" as a snapshot of income vs costs in a single current week. If you have more than 7 days of vision, and instead understand that the only financially sensible strategy is to build a model where you can achieve a 4,000+ home gate as a minimum, then you would not implement a tactic that makes achieving that less likely.

Is there a formula that simplifies that last Paragraph HKB!! Confused me- Probably not a bad thing Im not in "sales"

He should be at the Union really

Oh yeah the garlic munching hordes will fill one half of the East stand on a Thursday night!

Sorry, makes sense to me but what the hell, let's hammer it home in a boring fashion: Let's assume you have a finite amount of cash available, and your definition of "financially sensible" is not to spend any more than that number.

If your medium-term fixed costs exceed your income, you can reduce short-term loses by reducing variable costs, but as you are still not at break-even at that income level you WILL still run out of money eventually (just slower than you otherwise would)

However, if by maintaining or increasing costs you are able to grow income in the medium-term, you MAY have an opportunity to break-even (although if you fail, you will run out of money faster).

The second route offers the POSSIBILITY of success, albeit at the risk of quicker failure, whereas the first route offers CERTAINTY of failure, albeit one which may be delayed.

I would always choose the path that offers a possibility of success, even with greater risk, than one that offers a certaintly of failure. That would be my "financially sensible" route.

speculate to accumilate.......something that the club have continued to NOT do over the years.
I'm with HKB on this one. If we are going to fail, we may as well fail trying as against trying to fail

In light of the above posts-

What option is the club currently taking

And as both offer a "point of failure" when if at all will the club fail?

The Club are trying to forge relationships with "partners" such as Chessington WOA......and I see this as a massive positive. With the appointment of PB I see these reletaionships being developed as an ongoing process. I would personally give the game sponsorship to partner companies who share their customer data with us and I hope to God whomever they managed to sell tonights sponsorship gets a very loud plug from the stadium announcer during the game.This is very much a long term strategy and will take time to deliver tangible results, but is a massive improvement on previous years.

The amount of work that went into the Manly game was incredible and one of the main things learnt from it was that the London Media as a whole don't give a flying one about RL. The only way we will ever get more than a few lines here and there is if we pay for it and current budget restrictions point towards that not happening in the near future.
So, what do the club do? I would attempt to forge a relationship with one of the free papers (just how many are there now). This relationship would involve us paying some money (nowhere near book price) and in return, say, City AM, get boxes, tickets etc.......
As for local media, it is vital that we badger them constantly to get exposure. This may again involve cash changing hands, but we need to raise the profile of the club as a whole.
Also, I would imagine that after the Union season is over, we will look to leverage their community......but this time with a bit more convivction that in previous years.
Lastly, I would imagine that over the next 3 years the club will have set themselves targets and I would hope one of these would be to increase attendance. If I am correct (I had a quick scan earlier), we have pre-sold, including ST's, nearly 3,400 seats for tomorrows game. Of the remaining seats, about 500 are £25 seats and 250 odd really bad jesters (front rows). As has been discussed here, there are many who think that the East Stand isn't working and they would like to see the away fans moved to the North. On reflection, I have to agree with this sentiment, as I fear we may see a few walk away tomorrow when they turn up expecting to get a £15 ticket. The positive of this years East stand arrangement is the pre-sale of tickets. If these people are kept informed by email and encouraged to come back, this will give the club the opportunity to increase ST sales in future years. £199 for 14 games including the free CC game works out at £14 a game..... The club should give people who are coming regularly and pre-booking, the chance to buy a 1/2 year ST at some stage this spring and then immediately follow up at the end of the season with an instalment/DD option from September to Feb (6 payments of £33 is easier than £200 notes.
Oh........and as The Brit Oval sponsor Vauxhall station.......maybe we'll get some exposure at Twickenham station

GF, you're coming around!

I dont have a problem with the East Stand at all. I just beleive that all AWAY support should be put into the North Stand, Quins Fans in the East. If need be open the South if crowd figures push that way.

Yes there will be a lot of dissapointed Fans tomorrow if they are forced to buy £25 tickets, but then again I assume they will be able to sit in the south or the north. Which was my main gripe, if they are going to be open lets put away fans there in the first place and open up far more Jester seats for Quins or Neutrals.

I hope the front office are reading this, and take this up at the appropriate level. Dont say it cant be changed as the season has started, it will not effect any season ticket holders at all only away fans and may even encourage some others to return again.

I think this is the biggest problem. Too wide a range of prices and too many different prices within one stand. I know it's not practical at this stage of the season, but the Premier seats are either priced too high, or some of them need to be recategorised as Club (?) seats. More relatively cheap seats need to be made available.

Long term (i.e. after this season) prices need to remain more stable with no more than three, ideally just two, different price bands within one stand.

Our prices have fluctuated wildly in the four years back at the Stoop (sometimes dropping sharply as well as rising) with different parts of the ground being shut at various times, so people get forced to move or end up having to pay a fair bit more for the same seat and feel ripped off. Keep the East Stand as the main stand for next season but increase the cheaper prices and freeze or reduce the more expensive ones to lessen the disparity, and scrap one of the price categories altogether. Hopefully both ends can be open if crowd figures rise, and leave the Lexus Stand to the union team until we can pretty much fill the other three.

You have hit one of the key nails on the head here. Our price discrimination strategy has some structural weaknesses that are limiting seat distribution options - and probably a one factor driving some of the bad decisions being made by the club on this topic.

For example, let's assume we accept 4 things as true:
1. Seats down the side of the pitch are a preferred product, and the closer to half way and further back the seats are, the better the product is still.
2. The LV is preferred, as the view is better.
3. We want to offer home supporters the best experience, as increasing their repeat purchase propensity is THE critical success factor for our business (it drives all revenue streams, from ticketing, to game day food/drink/retail, and on to sponsorship)
4. We want to concentrate supporters together, to ensure customers get the best available atmosphere (and so increase repeat buys).

If you believe that, you would open the sections of the ground that deliver that experience to core customers most effectively. For example, each block is circa 500 seats, so by selling the centre 5 blocks of the LV to home support (the middle 3 mainly pre-sold as ST's) and always opening the middle 4 blocks of the East for away fans and overflow home walk-ups, you have a "capacity" of 4,500 (ie by not opening the end stands, and covering the end blocks of East/LV). If you know you're only going to sell 4,500 of your 12,500 products anyway, and the cost to you is (relatively) equal, then by selling your best 4,500 you make it more likely you get repeat purchases.

Simple eh? However, the current price discrimination strategy makes the club making this decision less likely. Why? Because as all seats are now "good" in the above model, you reduce the marginal difference between a "cheap" seat and an "expensive" seat, or a £99 season ticket and a £300 season ticket... if the £99 season tickets offer a view [ualmost[/u as good as a £300 view, why buy the £300 one?

So, because the club wants to maximise income from loyal and/or wealthier fans whose purchase is in the main non-discretionary, whilst at the same time incentivising new customers with an aggressively priced product, they don't pursue the blindingly obvious seat allocation strategy.

As ever, this is short termist nonsense, and indeed a massive red herring for our business. Most clubs avoid this problem by having far less price bandings. For example, at Hull KR a seat costs X and a standing ticket costs Y. That's it.

Multi-layered price discrimination is a strategy a near-capacity business would employ to maximise sales value per unit - eg it is why Quins RU do it - but it is not a priority tactic for a business at 30% capacity utilisation.

PS: There's loads of research showing that, assuming marketing & promotion volumes are equal, the two primary factors behind sports attendance growth are:
1. The closeness of the result (excitement = retention)
2. The timing of the event (ability to convert buyer interest to action)

In the longer term, price becomes a much weaker factor.

hey Lister - what are your thoughts on the above post by HKB?

Interestingly, and I dont know if this is correct, you have missed out success. The more successful sports clubs tend to have the better support numbers. Would this not be a factor.

I suspect if Newcastle Utd get relegated they will not be the 5th biggest supported club regardless of closeness of the results. Ala Leeds Utd