July 23, 2006
THE IRISH ARE PSYCHOS
Whatever the fate of its team, Notre Dame University does not want all comers to their football games. In perhaps one of the strangest marketing situations in sports marketing ever, the university actually polices second- and third-person sites to prevent resale of their tickets.
To get a ticket to a home game--which I now feel incredibly priveleged to have attended--one must pay a large bounty just to be entered into a lottery. If one is selected, one may purchase, for a relatively nominal fee, a seat. Here's the catch: if you try to re-sell your hard-to-find-ticket, you will be caught and banned for life from ever attending an ND game again.
The Notre Dame ticket office actively monitors and enforces the ticket resale policy (link: http://und.cstv.com/tickets/tickets-resale.html) in an effort to curb resale for profit and ticket fraud. More than 1,700 tickets have been suspended or revoked in the past three years. Enforcement methods include active monitoring of more than 20 Internet ticket resale Web sites, periodic purchasing of tickets from these entities, undercover game day operations, as well as follow-up on all leads provided to the ticket office. Suspected resale violation information can be sent to: seller1@nd.edu.
This type of command-and-control economics rubs me the wrong way. Ticket scalping is market economics at its best. Still, I have to admire ND for undertaking such a psychotically paranoid labor-intensive ticket monitoring enterprise. With guaranteed sellout crowds in perpetuity, the school is trying to guarantee the demographic diversity of its home crowds, rather than having them overcrowded with fat rich alumni exclusively. Perhaps that's why ND has such a resilient and loyal fan base, even when they suck for a decade and running [whoops! sorry guys.]
Tagged:Posted by Lexiphane at July 23, 2006 9:57 AM
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