Why Ticket Design Matters
Ticket design is often overlooked. Event planners and organizers
plan how many tickets they will need for a given event and how
to distribute those tickets, but stop short of putting much
thought into the ticket design itself. From a branding
perspective this is a lost opportunity. Branding is, after all,
managing all of the different touch points that an organization
has with the public and your tickets are one touch point that
all of your customers will come in contact with.
I have kept several tickets from events that I attended
including one from the 2002 Winter Olympics and four from the
2003 Notre Dame vs. Navy football game. I, like most people,
keep tickets from events that meant something to me, but there
is another factor in determining whether or not I keep the
ticket: what the ticket looks like.
The Salt Lake Olympic Committee (SLOC) went so far as to produce
two tickets for each seat, one that would get you into the door
and another that was just for souvenir purposes. While the
Olympics have a budget that dwarfs most other events, it shows
that they have realized that tickets themselves have value.
Check out the season tickets for any professional or college
sports team and you will see that someone has made a conscious
effort to create value through the design of that ticket. An
attractive ticket sells for more than a generic ticket because
people associate value with the look and feel.
Cost is probably the biggest factor when choosing a generic
ticket. Attractive tickets do cost more than generic ones. They
usually run $0.03-0.08 cents more per ticket than a generic
ticket does. However, if you charge 25 cents more per ticket
(and you easily can), that becomes a profit of 17 cents per
ticket ($170 for each thousand tickets that you sell). That
profit is on top of the marketing and advertising benefits that
you gain from having an attractive ticket. If people like the
tickets to your event they are more likely to show that ticket
to their friends (this is starting to sound like free, or viral,
advertising). Most of the marketing classes that I have taken,
focused on getting the most results from the smallest budget
possible, if that is your goal, then making money with your
tickets and getting marketing value is as good as it gets.
The bottom line is that the time, effort and money spent
designing tickets generally pays for itself. It may not be cost
effective to hire a full time graphic designer to create tickets
for you, but it does deserve your attention as you plan your
future events.