Rockets Marketing

Jeff,

A shortterm increase in renewal-driven markets is a longterm increase. More season ticket holders means less marketing expense to renew vs creating new season ticket holder. It is a longterm increase, because it is easier to raise prices on existing customers than non-customers.

The only viable reason that he choosing to not follow Price Elasticity is because he wants to artificially inflate prices now so that he can continue 5% increases leading into the new stadium.

Do you follow that. It is proven almost to pure economic law.

 

Either way the rich keep getting richer.

Give the little guy a break and he won't mind as much when you give him the shaft in the future. my 2 cents.

 

crispee,

I totally get what you are saying and you are right ASSUMING that those people who buy tickets become season ticket holders. Obviously, the goal of any team is to sell as many tickets as possible in bulk - i.e. season tickets. However, lowering the cost of inexpensive seats does not necessarily lead to season ticket sales directly.

Houston (not just the Rockets) has never traditionally been a strong base for season ticket holders because of the transient nature of the population. Even the Oilers never had 70 or 80 percent saturation of season tickets and they were, by far, the most popular ticket in town from the late 70's through the late 80's.

I agree with you that building a fan base is key and you do that by lowering ticket prices to get people in the seats so they can see what a great time they can have and they want more, etc, etc. The problem is that the Rockets have never addressed season ticket marketing or even ticket sales marketing with more than a cursory interest - the philosophy has largely been, "You know we're here when you want to show up."

They, to their credit, realize that is a mistake and hopefully will do something about it.