London was awarded the rights to host the Olympics Games of 2012. London won by 54 votes to 50 votes of Paris. Proposal submitted by London Bid Committee also impressed International Olympic Committee for hosting the Olympic Games (Gourville, and Bertini, 2011). As London had won the rights to host, there were several issues and challenges that had to be managed in order to organize the event successfully. Some of the major issues and challenges include; selling of tickets, attracting an audience to attend different events, encouraging high attendance at different events and not just in finals and opening ceremonies. Therefore, this report presents some recommendations and strategies that Williamson and the LOCOG could have used to meet these challenges.
One of the major challenges was to set the ticket price. Price of tickets was one of the major factors that could magnetize the audience. According to the principle of Economics, an increase in prices of a product or service will attract fewer customers (Mankiw, 2009). Therefore, setting the price of the tickets was one of the major issues and challenges that had to be dealt. So, one of the main questions was whether to keep the price high to attract less audience or to keep the prices low and attract more audience. For instance, there were two scenarios whether to achieve a ticket revenue of $50 million by having 70% of attendance attending the event or to achieve the target of $50 million by attracting 90% of the audience for the event.
Olympic Games are for everyone, and the pricing strategy should reflect that these games are for everyone (Gourville, and Bertini, 2011). Williamson with his experience wanted to make the most of the opportunities provided by this event and because of this particular reason, he stated that the team can neither miss the target revenues nor the target audience (Gourville, and Bertini, 2011).
Therefore, the recommendation and strategy that Williamson and LOCOG should adapt for the pricing of tickets would be:
- More audience will reflect an impression that the event is successful. If there are only a limited number of audiences watching the event, then this would give the impression not only to the participants and sponsors, but also to the audience around the world watching on television that the event is not successful.
- Low attendance could also hurt the image of Olympic Games in the future.
- It also recommended that the focus should be on attracting more audience during the initial games. This strategy will be helpful for the betterment of the event, and this will attract more people from different parts of UK and from other countries to come and watch the event at a later stage of the event.
- In addition to this, as football is the most popular game in UK, therefore tickets of footballs should be kept higher in order to generate more revenues from football.
- Similarly, other important events such as finals, tough matches or important matches should have a higher ticket price than normal matches as more audience would come during these matches. On the other hand, ticket prices for matches that are expected to have low audience should have low prices in order attract people that may not have come to watch the match.
Thus, this would still attract audiences to different matches. So, the strategies should be to charge more for special games as people would still come to watch and less for unimportant matches to attract more audience.
References
Gourville, J., and Bertini, M. (2011). The London 2012 Olympics Games. Harvard Business Review.
Mankiw, G. (2009). Principles of Economics. Mason, OH: South-Western Cengage Learning.
