Repost: Pricing

Friday, November 7, 2008 by John Robison.

A question arose on the city3 boards about pricing… it was interesting, and I posted the following. I repost it here in hopes that you will find it interesting, and perhaps throw your two cents into the discussion.

A lot of the pricing I do at the Imp has to do with the number of people in my cast… for a full show with six or seven folks, I usually charge $7.50, which has come down from the $10 we used to charge. I had a few audience members comment that perhaps $10 was a little high. I agreed… so prices came down a little, but they’re still enough that my players get a semi-decent payday. Exception: if it’s a group with a low amount of experience, I don’t charge as much.

For my other shows, I admit that I’ve been influenced heavily by ticket prices at i.o. We just had our first free Thursday show tonight… i.o. has a free show every Wednesday. You can see T.J. & Dave for $5… it seems wrong to think I should charge more for my two-person show than they charge. I might one day, but not now. Because they are fabulous.

I’m also currently trying to hook in a lot of families, who have really responded to a $5 per person price. They can afford to bring kids, and still end up spending quite a bit more in concessions. This is really working for our “Harold” and “Trivial Prov-suit” family shows. We’ve had kick-butt crowds for these shows lately. I also hope that this kind of pricing will help balance out the KC audience member’s thought that RI is a little farther away… which is also helping out. I have one audience member that drives out every weekend from Lee’s Summit. I’m not sure she’d do it if she had to pay $10-$15.

At this point, I’m not depending on ticket price to tell the audience what kind of show they’ll be seeing. Instead, I’m relying more on the Roving Imp brand… people are starting to know that whatever show happens under the RI banner will be a quality, fun show. I’m also making a semi-futile attempt to use kcstage.com to help folks figure out what kind of show they’re going to see. I don’t have to worry much about comparisons between groups and group prices… about 90-95% of my audience sees only RI shows, or has never seen an improv show before…

There you go. My whole pricing thought. What do you think, and who’s next?

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