“THEORY ENDS HERE”
– sign on the door to the production office at Boston University’s film department

working with so many music festivals i’ve come to see the pattern in their ticket sales to be a kind of concentrated tour through all the major factors involved in driving adoption.

like the type of excursion that shuttles travellers to all the major european cities in the course of 6 days, from the moment a pre-sale begins till the gates close a music festival’s on-sale period exposes a landscape of distinct adopter personas within the kind of condensed time-frame that could double for an academic experiment on diffusion dynamics. while the details vary from one type of music event to another, in general certain things hold true. a huge amount of tickets–often-times the vast majority–are sold late. yet most people attending a major music festival have known about it, and have actually been considering going for some time before finally making their decision. this despite the fact that a ticket at the end of the on-sale period is considerably more expensive than it is at the beginning, since tickets scale in price as lower-priced tiers sell out.

inevitably this raises the question: WHY are the vast majority of folks waiting till the ticket is at its most expensive to commit to making a purchase?

the answer to this is not only about the dynamics of adoption for music festivals, but sheds light on the factors that drive adoption in a much broader sense. a couple of months ago i wrote a post comparing various music festival websites and mentioned that:

essentially there are three things that a festival is selling:

1. the event lineup
2. the event brand
3. the event community

like toilet paper, tissues, and paper towels, they’re all made up of the same stuff, and to a certain degree serve an interchangeable function, but at the end of the day, you do buy each for different reasons.

to broaden the application of what i’m talking about, lets consider that every time i mention “the lineup” what i am essentially referring to is the “product.” features, design elements, utility, whatever. think of “the lineup” as the thing with the actual bar-code on it–unless you too happen to be in the business of selling tickets.

what that ticket is actually SELLING–the cumulative representation of lineup, brand, and community–is different at different stages throughout the course of an event’s on-sale period. the point at which someone buys a ticket (aka where on the adoption chart they fit in) tends to be a result of the relevance that that particular combination of lineup, brand, and community has for them. these three elements are distinct adoption-drivers whose impact and interplay it is essential to understand in order to develop an effective marketing strategy–whether for a music festival or anything else really.

1. EARLY ADOPTERS BUY ON BRAND

unlike selling tangible goods, where the product and brand are generally simultaneous and thus difficult to separate and examine independently, selling an “experience” makes it much easier. when we initially launched the pre-sale for the Do LaB’s Lightning in a Bottle music festival we did not announce a lineup.

with the “product” an unknown, and the community still solely theoretical (sure, you may know who’s LIKELY to go, but the first week of a pre-sale you’re not likely to know too many people that actually ARE going) the most overt selling point was inevitably the brand.

the do lab had been creating events for seven years at that point, establishing a reputation for consistently spectacular, jaw-dropping creations, and the people who bought tickets that first week before either the lineup or community of LIB was a viable element, bought on the basis of the identification they had with the brand.

that bold stuff is the common denominator that i believe drives early adopters in general. whether you’re nike coming out with a new type of shoe, or lexus with a new model of car, or mac with a new sort of i-something, the people at the very front of the line buy on the basis of the identification they feel with the brand.

the first tier of lowest-priced tickets was sold out before we announced the lineup, having gone to the do’s most ardent early supporters. i imagine to a lot of people reading this (due to the nature of this medium’s demo) the logic in that kind of arrangement is self-evident, however, because i have seen this group be treated with the most extreme disregard, i’m going to go off on a little tangent here.

the folks who would buy a ticket without even knowing who’s playing, in a more traditional marketing model have generally been regarded as the most easily conned. the cheapest date who evidently requires the least amount of wooing. in the do lab world however, and in a world of brands that actually care about their consumers, a world that is being more and more empowered by social media, that kind of take-the-money-and-run mentality is going to fly less and less.

early adopters buy on brand, and yours better be the kind of brand that understands the necessity of rewarding them for this devotion as opposed to taking advantage of them for it, otherwise you’re going to LOSE them.

2. EARLY MAJORITY BUYS ON BRAND + PRODUCT & DRIVES COMMUNITY

the conventional assumption has been that it is the early adopters who steer a product to eventual popularity, but as the prior article on late adopter strategy pointed out, that is not necessarily the case. i’m of the opinion that it is actually the early majority that is responsible for pushing adoption against gravity, up the slope of the s-curve. in the case of LIB, an easy way to define the early majority is everyone who bought a ticket from the point when the lineup was announced, up until two and a half months later when the online sales officially ended the night before doors opened.

in the marketing bible malcolm gladwell splits the burden of causing cultural epidemics to “tip” between three types of culprits: connectors, mavens, and salesmen. gladwell gives an example of one such a maven: a man who after getting taken to a new japanese restaurant by his daughter and liking the food, comes home and sends an email to all his acquaintances who live near the restaurant recommending that they check it out. mavens, i would say, are the folks that comprise the early majority in general, and they make or break “critical mass” for adoption by generating what is technically referred to as, uh…. buzz. if you understand the impact of this, you’ll do everything you can to give them the tools and the content they’re looking for to help them do just that.

3. LATE MAJORITY – BUYS ON COMMUNITY

the late majority of a music festival is likewise easy to identify: it’s all the people who bought tickets at the door. in the case of LIB07 this turned out to be approximately 2/3 of the total purchasers. since this was a weekend-long camping event, it’s not exactly the kind of thing that had a spur-of-the-moment appeal. pretty much all of the late majority had known about this festival for a while. they knew the lineup, they knew the brand, but did not make their purchase until the last minute. why?

they were waiting on the community aspect to build. for the late majority, it is the community–a factor that is nonexistent when the tickets are inexpensive–that makes the higher price of the ticket worth it. when the buzz gets loud enough is when the late majority starts to realize that they don’t want to miss out on getting to share an experience with all their friends. in the same way that brand functions as the major motivator for the early adopters, community fills that role for the late majority.

in the conversation that is going on right now about how to measure the success of social engagement, an interesting factor to throw into the equation is that the “late majority” gets the thing once all their friends have it and won’t shut up about it–and this applies to whether we’re talking about a ticket to a festival, a pair of sneakers, an mp3-player, whatever. the better a brand’s social engagement strategy (and this transcends simply online social engagement, by the way), the easier it is for the early majority to build that buzz. the “effectiveness” of social engagement can thus be seen as directly correlated to the size of a product’s “late majority” purchasers. (tho it sure don’t hurt the other categories none either).

in the end, it comes down to developing a strategy that addresses what is relevant to the different personas on the adoption curve (in the broadest sense: brand, product, and community), and likewise is then able to proactively anticipate and deliver on these elements in ways which will help expand the adoption to the next phase.