John U. Bacon article on decreasing student attendance and game experience at Mich. Stadium

At the turn of the century 14 years ago.

http://tmd.pub.umich.edu/content/football-ticket-prices-going

"Martin announced the price hike and highlighted other parts of the plan including seating restructuring at yesterday"s meeting of the University Board of Regents. Yesterday evening, Martin also sent an e-mail to University students highlighting the changes.

Additionally, Martin said, the University soon plans to take measures to make sure student tickets are not being sold for profit.

"When I was a student I had to show my ID. That is coming again. Trust me," Martin said. "It just turns me sideways when I turn on eBay and see all these tickets for sale, and you look at the section number and you know those are student seats."

So let's not pretend this is a new phenomenon, or the fault of Dr. Dave Evil.  I think Bill Martin is giving us a clue as he complains about the secondary market.  He was upset that the stadium was being filled by non-students as students sold their tickets on the secondary market.  

Well hello, that's been the case since I started attending 40 years ago while in HS.  Student ticket sales are a function of the secondary market and they always have been.  If the team is a national contender and plays meaningful homegames student will snap those tickets up so they can resell them at a tremendous profit.  

Want to sell more student tickets, first be a national contender.  Second, have decent home schedules.  Third, stop worrying about who is sitting in the seat, make the tickets annoymous so they can be readily sold on the secondary market.

watches every game religiously with other non-alums, I can say it's propbably the 60" TV effect for us. We go to one game a year but it's becoming more of a "duty" now. We don't want to break our 12 year string.

We don't care about the band but we do hate the rawk music and extra noisy bullshit on the big screen every second play is not in motion. We also really don't mind the ticket price or the price of the concessions, but even for us something about the experience from when we started this thing 12 years ago to now is vastly different. I can't imagine how pissed I'd be if I'd actually attended the school and/or was getting bent over as a long time season ticket holder.

DB has really accomplished in a positive frame regarding the football Saturday experience.  

He has imparted more regulations than any previous AD that I can think of ... water @ $4.50, the seat cusion debacle, closing an entire gate for students only, cost for university football parking increasing every year.  He screwed the home crowd with the Jerry Jones bowl with Alabama and continues to treat the U of M student like shit.

Can anyone think of a positive change that is now a part of a Michigan football Saturday ?

Go Blue!

I generally enjoy John Bacon's writing but he is increasingly acting like a jilted lover. Constantly trying to get revenge on the AD which has marginalized him in the wake of his latest book, he just plain hates Brandon and it shows. This piece is nothing.

I've had alumni season tickets since 2009. I gave them up last year for a few reasons, all of which Bacon has touched on:

• They are really expensive - with PSLs plus per game ticket prices, it is very expensive, and my seats were amongst the cheapest;
• I live out of state, so I would attend one game a year and sell the remaining tickets. Because of a weak product plus a really pitiful schedule, I often had to sell tickets for well below face value. Thus, the actual cost of me attending one game was many many times above face value (excluding travel)
• The in-stadium experience now is no different than a NFL game. I don't want a commercialized product. 
• Because the in-stadium experience is totally commercial, I'd rather watch the game on my giant TV, drink some beer, enjoy the air conditioning, and mute the commercials (or flip to another game).

I might be willing to put up with the prices and commercialization if Michigan were winning 11 games a year, but I really doubt it. At the end of the day, it'd be more economical for me to buy tickets to the one game I want to attend on Stubhub and not get saddled with a bunch of dead weight.

I haven't found a lot of occasions to agree with Bacon, but I'm on board with this piece 100%.  Brandon has been screwing with the non-student season ticket holders since he got here and last year he sealed his fate with the students as well.  

I think Bacon says it best (and now I paraphrase so as not to add even more traffic to shut his site) when he (approximately) says that Brandon is trying to make Michigan football just like any NFL game when Michigan fans love Saturdays because it isn't a generic NFL experience.

Is anyone attributing declining attendance partially to the Michigan brain drain? In particular between 2008 and recently when auto companies (and pretty much all other Detroit-area companies) weren't hiring, alums had to leave the state to find work. I'm sure that's always been happening, but of the major group of people I graduated with in 2009, most of them left Michigan and aren't buying season tickets. At best, we make it back for one game a season, but even that is a stretch.

if michigan is competing for big ten titles every year, then attendance is not an issue.

current students have either seen one good year, or none at all. and since more and more students are from out-of-state and therefore not as inclined to be michigan football fans before coming, all they know is the current mediocre product.

michigan basketball is equally commercialized, and there is no attendance problem there.

In Brandon's defense, $100 million will be put into new non-revenue sport facilities. UofM prides itself on having Olympic caliber varsity level teams, they think it raises the prestige of the school. Here's the problem though - attendance levels and fundraising at non-revenue sports is not covering the operating costs and future costs for facility improvements!

The taking the "customer" for granted has been going on at the Big House and at the University itself for some time. A2 has become a money grab led by the MBA smartest guys in the room.

Fiscal responsibility is an abstract thought. The mantra is get bigger, don't cut ,spend more, pay for it by charging fans and students more because they will. We are Michigan!

I am a two time UM grad who has a child applying to colleges. It is very interesting to see how UM markets itself versus MSU. UM needs to get over itself, and stop taking students, alums, and fans for granted.

You don't have to take Marketing 101 to understand that people have choices with their time and money and will spend it where THEY THINK they get the most value.

That said, win games and most of the displeasure goes away.  When you are stuck in a perpetual state of mediocrity, people tend to find any and everything they can to complain about.  Just win games and beat rivals and this stuff recedes back to the fringes again.

Winning fixes everything. After the disaster of 2013, people want to see good football. Put that on the field, and Brandon can charge whatever he wants.

Bacon's article moves quickly from the subject of low student attendance to (paraphrasing) 'everything I don't like about Brandon and UM football but 'it's not because I lost my press credentials".  Since Bacon's article is all over the place, so are the comments.  Some complain justifiably about the prices for everything, some cannot reconcile the current experience with their traditional view of a MIchigan football experience (Beyonce, etc.).  Some point to the shitty home schedule and the recent records.  Tossed aside by Bacon is the availablability of HD television.  There are many moving parts in this problem, whether you define it as student attendance or attendance.  The change away from the seniority student model didn't just come out of Brandon's ass, it was an attempt to address the problem of students showing up late, which many here bitched about. It, obvioiusly, spectacularly failed (like the sky writing over Lansing). I don't even know what goals Brandon is trying to meet or who set them.  From far outside, it looks like maximizing short term revenue it the primary goal.  I guess the idea is that we want to win, so we need a lot of money to attract coaches, athletes, etc.  That is not the same as a goal of meeting the wants  and needs of students, or alumni or television networks or televison viewers.  I don't know who makes the decisions about what Brandon is ultimately supposed to be accomplishing, but it appears to be short term revenue maximization.  He is satisfying that goal.  I think it is the wrong goal and long-term loyalty is far more important.  The students rated seating as their most important issue.  That is the place to start, but it is only a small part of the problem.  As others noted, many good programs (not to mention the NFL) are experiencing declining attendance.  I agree that the outside-in approach is best (I forget what they called it when I took marketing classes in 1974, but it certainly existed and was promoted by professors).  It might be easier to focus on these problems with a few less variables (after the sucky schedule and sucky recent record).  Ultimately, however, I don't know what Brandon's goal is, satisfying students or alumni or TV audiances or just throwing anything against the wall and hoping it makes everybody happy or pisses everybody off, but gains revenue.  

Once I forced myself to read his annoying one-line sentences (did he teach this in his class?), all I took away was a collection of lines that are loosely connected to each other, all trying to make some larger point that its the AD's fault in addition to technology. Which made it all feel like the workings someone who feels he as been wronged by "the system." Next thing you know, Bacon is going to be sending special packages in the mail to the AD. 

1. I actually like Martin's idea of students getting in free.  Check IDs at the door.  First come, first served.  The downside of having to show up so early is offset by the upside of paying $0.  The problem with GA seating at M stadium is that the size of the seats is for an ass the size of a grade schooler.  When you don't give people an actual seat, they'll choose to sit comfortably (shock!) and 21,000 students won't fit into those 21,000 "seats."  So the remedy there would be to have individual chair-back seats as opposed to boundaryless bleachers.  Can't get 115K attendance?  Add more rows to the top.
2. As to branding, I'd be willing to bet Canham thought and maybe even talked about branding all the time, but I'd be willing to double down that he never referred to Michigan Athletics as such in public or the press.
3. More about branding: the first step is to determine what you want the brand to mean in the hearts and minds of consumers.  I think DB would even agree that means "tradition, honor, integrity, and excellence," or something along those lines.  Once you make that determination, all marketing executions should communicate that to the consumer.  In my opinion, most of what has been going on lately communicates quite the opposite.
4. Clearly, intercollegiate athletics is a service-based product, and not a manufactured, tangible one.  In service marketing, being consistently successful means giving consumers a "wow" experience; i.e., they get a lot more than they expect.  By definition, that means you give a lot of the surplus value to the consumer and not try to put as much of that into your own coffers as possible.

I find it ironic in an article decrying crass commercialisn how Bacon manages to plug his latest book at least 3 times.