Auburn University's Pricing Strategies

Words: 644
Pages: 3

Describe what is happening in the article by applying a marketing principle or strategy from class to the article. In this article the authors discuss the difficulties Auburn University had when trying to sell tickets to football games for the 2013 season. They opted to go to the boosters, offering them incredible deals in hopes that they could sell the tickets in large quantities. This was relatively successful, but they still weren’t able to get all of the tickets sold. The ticket packages offered by Auburn University included games against Georgia and Alabama, who are big Southeastern conference rivals. The idea behind Auburns thinking was that by selling tickets to boosters in large quantities they could keep ticket scalpers from making …show more content…
This pricing strategy of trying to sell strictly to Auburn fans ended up having a hugely negative impact. If Auburn would have simply waited instead of panicking when ticket sales began to struggle they could have sold the tickets at a higher price that would have generated roughly 1 million dollars in revenue. The article talks about how Big Ten Conference Rutgers introduced a new dynamic pricing strategy. This new pricing strategy was said to bring in an extra $400,000 in increased revenue for Rutgers. Big Ten rival Northwestern took a different pricing strategy approach. They opted to save roughly 2,000 tickets and used a descending-price auction system for their home opener against Ohio State University. This pricing strategy proved to be very successful for Northwestern, generating nearly triple the original value of the seats for that game netting the school and extra $250,000. Louisiana State Univeristy decided to use a variable price strategy. By doing this they were able to change the price of the un-purchased tickets the closer they got to the games. This saw a 40% increase in revenue for football games that season at Louisiana State University. All of these are examples of successful pricing strategies