Did you even know there are two Telecharge websites out there?

There are.

One is Telecharge.com, the one you know and love.  The other, formerly known as BroadwayOffers.com, has now been rebranded as  . . . dum-da-da-dum . . . TelechargeOffers.com.

What’s the diff between the two?

Telecharge Offers is the buying path for discounts.

In a blog recently posted on Shubert Ticket Notes, the industry-insider ticketing and sales blog, the Ticketing Gurus over at Telecharge opened up about the history and the reasoning behind the two purchase paths (they hearken back to the days of cutting coupons and mailing them in – we’re talking stone age here).

It’s a pretty simple strategy.  They contend that if a customer sees an “enter promotional code” box on a website and they don’t have one, they may think, “Huh, I gotta get one of those there codes, and maybe I shouldn’t buy until I have one, or maybe I’ll google around and see what I can . . . oh, hello BroadwayBox and thank you for saving me 40%!”

And as a consumer myself, I gotta admit that if I see one of them there boxes, I’ll take a few extra moments to see what I can find.  It’s human nature.  We want what we don’t have, so throwing that box in the customer’s face is almost a challenge . . . hence the alternate Telecharge site.

It’s all about protecting the full price buyer, which as I’ve said several times on this blog, is what fuels Broadway.  No show can survive solely on discounts, so we need to do whatever we can to convert the discount buyer to a full price buyer, or at least a higher priced discount buyer (that’s why I started this strategy on all of my shows – I call it the BroadwayBox Killer).

The insightful blog, which you can and should read here, continues on to say that the six longest running shows on Broadway don’t have public discount codes posted.  Is their financial success attributed to their lack of open access discounts?  Or does the show just have enough demand to not need it (in this case, I think it’s the latter)?

The modern consumer wants a discount.  You want a discount.  I want a discount.  Even our investors want discounts.  The only time we don’t want a discount is when it’s for our own shows.

We’ll never get rid of discounts.  So we have to learn to work with ’em, and two purchasing paths just may be one of the answers.

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