SeaWorld announces end to orca breeding

Or it means both of you are right... ;~)

slithernoggin said:

I spoke to a woman at work today who didn't know how to close a browser window. Folks like her couldn't find a way to watch Blackfish on line.

I would assume that this same woman would not know that Sea World raised their gate price while not offering any new attraction.

LK, it just means that you and LG are both pretty. :-)

Shades, it was an epic phone call all around. Seriously: I don't think she could find her own ass with both hands and a road map.

I get that companies can and to collect various data from their customers. And many of us leave vast evidence trails (treasure trove for marketers) in terms of electronic payments. Here we are talking about people who were not customers of SeaWorld. Much more difficult to collect data from those people. And the whys are more difficult to come by even from your own customers.

There are typically multiple reasons why we do what we do (and don't do). And often times those factors are subconscious. We may lie to ourselves and/or people who ask us about our decisions.

So why did SeaWorld attendance decrease? No one knows. Bunch of Monday morning quarterbacks (including the company's CEO though as I noted earlier, there is bias there) trying though.

I am in the same boat as GoBucks. I admit that I am naive about tracking consumer behavior but I am not sure how they would figure out if a guest quit coming let alone an answer to "why did you stop coming to our park". They might know that a frequent visitor stopped coming because their credit card is no longer showing up in the data but how would they know that a casual one time visitor quit coming? And what would tip their hand as to why they quit coming? And how would they ever know that Joe Guest simply never ever went to the park because of his hatred towards the park after watching Blackfish?

It's not as hard as you think. Consumer research has been a thing for a long time, even before you could achieve the kind of specificity that you can now with mountains of data.

Plus, in this context, it's not about noticing and deducting why specifically Joe Sixpack from 123 Fake Street in Anytown, USA didn't visit the park again.

It's looking at attendance figures and going, "Crap. We lost a half a million visitors compared to last year"

It's pretty easy to see people quit coming. That's the easy part.

The "why" is the fun part. :)

The "why" is quite simple. People stopped coming when they switched to Coke and ceased to be the shining oasis of Mountain Dew in a city of otherwise Dewless attractions.

Blackfish Schmackfish.

Jeff said:

It's not as hard as you think. Consumer research has been a thing for a long time, even before you could achieve the kind of specificity that you can now with mountains of data.

I know it has been around forever but what specificity is available with the data? Yes the park knows that not as many people are coming through the turn-styles but what sort of data is available that tells them why? Without that the mountains of data don't really mean much.

Focus groups and surveys are fairly easy ways to capture the data without even knowing if someone has visited or plans to visit.

Conduct multiple focus groups or send surveys to different groups of people and you likely get different results. Which one is right?

When I say specificity, I'm not talking about individuals, I'm talking about the specific data points (demographics, spending habits, etc.), and the "right" results are just statistics. Once you reach a statistically significant number of people, adjust for the demographics of the sample vs. the actual population, and you have a pretty realistic view of the world. A small focus group won't get you anywhere.

kpjb said:
People stopped coming when they switched to Coke and ceased to be the shining oasis of Mountain Dew

They call me Mello Yello (quite rightly)
They call me Mello Yello (quite rightly)

All they need to do is bring back the free beer. They could sell orca burgers in the concessions and no one would care.

Jeff said:

When I say specificity, I'm not talking about individuals, I'm talking about the specific data points (demographics, spending habits, etc.), and the "right" results are just statistics. Once you reach a statistically significant number of people, adjust for the demographics of the sample vs. the actual population, and you have a pretty realistic view of the world. A small focus group won't get you anywhere.

What do demographics, spending habits, etc have to do with explaining why people are not going to the park? Knowing that their crowd is X% black/white/latino/whatever and they spend X/Y/Z dollars while going to the park for X/Y/Z days tells them what their patrons are doing but it doesn't tell them anything about why their non-patrons are staying away, which is what I thought the point of this whole discussion was about. Did I miss something?

Yes, I think you missed something. Don't get hung up on the demographics. They're used for the purpose of adjusting a statistically significant sample of opinions to draw larger conclusions. If you ask a thousand people if they kick puppies, and 60% of the respondents are male, you have to adjust your numbers because the actual world is only 50% male. (I'm not saying a thousand people is statistically significant... it depends.)

Scientific studies are conducted the same way, preferably with large data sets adjusted in meaningful ways. You don't test a drug on 10 people and approve it because your sample is too small to reasonably conclude anything.

The point is that you can ask a wide body of people questions about their tourism behavior and be pretty damn certain about why they are or are not visiting your park. Trust me, everyone's consumer research includes non-customers.

(Sidebar: Universal is really big on this. The depth and frequency of their survey efforts are remarkable even from an outside perspective.)

Thanks for the clearer explanation. I guess I have never been exposed to a survey asking why I don't do something. The only surveys I ever get are a result of me doing some action, never an inaction.

I have. And it only makes sense: how do you convert non-customers to customers without knowing why they aren't to choosing to be a customer.

I work at Blue Man in Chicago, now in its 19th year here, and part of why we've been here that long is that we work on understanding customers and non-customers.

This investor presentation indicates that they conducted several surveys of "participants among the general population in the company’s key regions." The results suggested that ending the Orca breeding program would have a greater effect than a new roller coaster on increasing the survey respondent's consideration of vising SeaWorld.

If the surveys are so accurate, why, per the investor presentation "after appropriate discounting," must management assume that consumers act consistently with the survey results?