Fundamentals of Management Project

Bailey Ellis, Jesse Ferreira, Megan Holcombe, Valentina Pinzon, Kelsey Reed.
April 24th, 2023
How many of you have bought tickets from Ticketmaster? Did you
have any inconvenience throughout the process?
Ticketmaster sells approximately 500 million tickets annually and has roughly
115,900,000 monthly active users.

(Spikes occur when issues are significantly higher than

normal, basically showing recurrent issues with
management.)

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 What is Ticketmaster?
● Ticketmaster is a company that sells tickets for various live events.

● Their mission statement states that the company strives to make

purchasing tickets easy and convenient for fans.

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 Issues Surrounding the Company
● Slow to innovate.
● An increase of ticket sniping, where "a person or entity that purchases tickets with
the intent of reselling them at a higher price" (Loewenstein, 2010). Ticket sniping
decreases the number of people able to sign in to get tickets since bots can pack
queues at superhuman speeds, making events sold out in seconds.
● Attempted to fix this issue by making fans register and verify themselves, but were
widely unsuccessful as the site was full of glitches and delays.
● Managers at Ticketmaster have breached legal contracts stating that they would not
force venues to use their company for tours. As a result, the US govt is demanding the
company break up to protect consumer interests.
● With all this said, Ticketmaster's reputation is slowly sinking to be one thought of as
corrupt and advantageous, a reputation that will only reduce profits later on. For
Ticketmaster to resolve this problem, management must overcome the challenge of
fitting the ethical standard.

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● Ticketmaster has failed to have a system
that limits bots and scammers.

● When Taylor Swift’s ‘The Eras Tour’ tickets

went on sale, only 1.5 million verified
customers were expected to enter the
system, but 14 million entered instead.

● To put it in perspective: during just the

presale, the majority of the venues were
sold out, leaving no general sale tickets
left.

● This caused the site to crash multiple times

and customers to spend hours in the
queue.

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 “
“We knew bots would attack [Taylor Swift’s] Onsale and planned
accordingly. We were then hit with three times the amount of bot
traffic that we’d ever experienced, and for the first time in 400 Verified
Fan Onsales, they came after our Verified Fan password servers as
well.” - Joe Berchtold (President of Live Nation Entertainment)

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These are just a couple of examples of the error messages
customers received while trying to purchase tickets.

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 Prices, fees, and taxes
Ticketmasters’ excessive charges on
their products are almost as much as
the tickets themself. The taxes and
fees can be between 25%-50% of the
ticket prices.

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 SMART Goals
To resolve these issues, Ticketmaster needs to revise its SMART goals.
● Ticketmaster needs to revisit its initial goals and make them more suitable for its mission
statement, which states that the company strives to make obtaining tickets easy and convenient. To
do this, Ticketmaster needs Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Results-oriented goals and have a
Target date.
● Primarily, the company needs to refocus on the customer and regain customer trust, obtaining
customer loyalty in return.
● An example of this would be to “increase customer loyalty by being more transparent about fees
and resolving bugs and bots effective by May first. Additionally, 90% of customers should be
through the queue without issues within the first 5 minutes of the site opening”.

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 SWOT Analysis
STRENGTHS WEAKNESSES
● Offers a variety of artists, ● High ticket prices, fees, and
venues, and events. taxes.
● Secure ● Bad reputation due to
monopoly status

● Does not have many strong

competitors, but StubHub
● Lowering prices, fees, and and SeatGeek are options
taxes. ● Recent events causing
● Investing in partnerships lawsuits to rise
OPPORTUNITIES THREATS

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 Five Forces Model of Competition
● Rivalry: low- because very little competition.
● New Entrants: medium- customers would be open to new reliable alternatives.
● Suppliers: high- Ticketmaster has a lot of partnerships with other companies,
venues, and artists.
● Buyers: high- Ticketmaster sells around 5 million tickets each year.
● Substitutes: low- buying tickets digitally is primarily the only way to purchase.

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 Competitive Environment
● Ticketmaster controls around 70% of the ticketing and live event
market.
● Competitors include StubHub, Live Nation, Vivid Seats, Songkick,
SeatGeek, AXS, TicketWeb, Eventbrite, Ticket Center, and
TicketNetwork.
● Live Nation merged with Ticketmaster in 2010 to create Live Nation
Entertainment.
● In theory, Ticketmaster should operate in an oligopoly system, but their
strongest competitors cannot compete at the same level.

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 VRIN/VRIO Analysis
● Valuable? Yes. Over the years, Ticketmaster has developed a unique image
along with high brand integrity. This image has led to high brand
recognition and success.

● Rare? Yes. Ticketmaster has an extensive global presence that is a rare

resource. Ticketmaster has shown the ability to adapt to different cultures
easily. This rare feature has allowed them more accessibility and visibility
over the market.

● Inimitable? Yes/No. Many companies have tried to offer the same

services but haven't had as much success. The type of experience they
offer their customers is a resource that could not be more inimitable.

● Substitutable? Yes/No. Many different sites are starting to offer the same
products as Ticketmaster.
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 Creating a Reactive and Proactive Change

Reactive: Proactive:
Making changes in response to problem Making plan changes in anticipation of possible or
or opportunities as they arise. expected problems or opportunities.
Do not ignore the problem.
Contingency Planning Options: (Proactive)
As we have seen, Ticketmaster has had many problems regarding sales, organization, bots,
software, and customer dissatisfaction. As a result, the company must create a contingency
plan for future concerts and events; they should develop solutions for different situations
and be prepared in case the website shuts down or there is any price error.

Plan for Employ robust Plan for

addressing and
algorithms to
detect the pattern
addressing
eliminating bots: of the malicious customers critics
bots and and value their
differentiate them
1. Keep websites up from humans, thus feedback:
to date. making sure that
the bots are
2. Use CAPTCHA exterminated.
➢ Surveys
➢ Calls
3. Robust anti-bot
solution.
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 RECOMMENDATIONS

Option 1 Option 2 Option 3

● Stagger ticket ● Require customers to enter ● Lower taxes and fees.
purchasing times so the presale code before they
the system is not can enter the queue to avoid
overloaded. scammers and bots.

● Develop a software that

controls and avoid bots
entering the presale and sale.
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 FINAL RECOMMENDATIONS

Listening to the needs of the customers. For the amount

of taxes and fees customers are charged, they should be
receiving better service and an easier process. As a
result, Ticketmaster will experience less financial loss
from lawsuits and customer outrage, and more profits
from successful sales and unproblematic business.

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 In Review
● Ticketmaster is one of the most well-known companies that sells tickets for
different live events
● Ticketmaster hosts events at many different venues for many different artists.
● Over the years Ticketmaster has shifted their focus from the customers to the
venues.
● The Taylor Swift 'The Eras Tour' tickets went on sale and caused a huge system
crash. The resulted in many people voicing their frustrations with
Ticketmaster as a whole.
● Fees have drastically increased for fans, and they are often not shown until
the very end of the purchase.
● In order to improve customer satisfaction, Ticketmaster should focus on
lowering additional fee prices, making the website more secure, and
staggering ticket purchase times.

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 SOURCES
● https://www.usesignhouse.com/blog/ticketmaster-stats

● https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/24/arts/music/ticketmaster-taylor-swift-senate
-hearing.html

● https://www.similarweb.com/website/ticketmaster.com/competitors/

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Thanks for listening
Any questions or comments?

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