What Should Racecourses Do to Increase Attendance, Boost Revenue and Encourage Positive Customer Behaviour that Enhances Everyone’s Experience of and Pleasure in Racing?

Today’s blog follows on from a three-part series I did after Newbury’s Hennessy Day denim débacle (regular readers know how much I like alliteration), when they managed to antagonise lots of customers – including my wife. Very much a PR fiasco. Whether or not it led to the sacking of the former joint MD Steve Higgins is not known, but they now have a new and much more experienced CEO in Julian Thick (former MD of Aintree). As I also flagged up in the last blog, Newbury, like most racecourses in the UK, is facing many financial challenges as well as declining attendances.

Indeed, as I put pen to paper (or more accurately, fingers to keyboard), I’ve just read that the Racecourse Association has gloomily reported that over the last ten years, the average raceday attendance has dropped by 1,000. While that doesn’t sound a lot, it certainly does when you put it into the context that on most race days there are 5,000 or fewer attendees, so it is a 20% decline in an increasingly competitive sport and leisure marketplace where customers have a range of opportunities to spend their hard-earned.

Since Hennessy Day, I’ve probably had more discussion with owners around this subject (all triggered by the denim disaster at Newbury) than any other. Obviously there are no magic bullets, and it is a very challenging area, but here is a summary of views.

• Offer an exciting product. Alas, it certainly looks as though there is far too much racing in the UK, with a lot of it complete dross. It may make money for certain courses, and put money into the bookies’ satchels, but at a risk of fundamentally eroding both the integrity of racing (most of the scandals occur in Class 6 races on the all-weather) and its aura of glamour, panache and excitement. What should change over the next ten years?
• Keep and foster your customers. No business can afford to lose customers. It is much harder to acquire new ones than retain the ones you already have. Irritating, antagonising or offending them through poor service, bad racing, ill thought-out initiatives or just simple neglect is inexcusable. Do racecourses have really effective customer retention strategies?
• Know who your customers are. In my consulting career, when I worked for fmcg companies as Diageo and Reckitt Benckiser, I was impressed by the quality of their marketing and the incredibly detailed analysis of what, in the jargon, is called “customer segments”. They weren’t just selling to “drinkers” or “householders”, but to literally hundreds of different types of people, backgrounds, ages and preferences. Huge investment was made in differentiated sales and marketing campaigns aimed at these well-defined segments. Do racecourses have such modern and professional campaigns mapped out? I’d love to see one. Indeed, a few years ago there was a woefully pathetic stereotyping of racegoers into a “Bill and Ben” type of categorisation, “Bill” being the old-fashioned racegoer vs. “Ben” as the trendy adherent of social media – a fatuous and totally inadequate segmentation. 
• Invest in modern marketing. This naturally follows. I’m sure there are some brilliant marketing people in racing, but I haven’t come across many. The few I have met at racecourses have been distinctly ordinary. A few questionnaires and a bit of direct mail doesn’t cut the mustard. How do racecourses select and remunerate their sales and marketing staff? I fear, poorly.
• Invest in frontline staff training. Friendly, well-informed, professional and helpful staff hugely enhance the racecourse experience, while their opposites detract from it. The “best” racecourses in the UK seem to get this right, but alas they are definitely in the minority. I’ll do some more blogs on this subject. All too often the staff are boorish, ignorant and unhelpful. During the Newbury débacle I just about lost patience with staff who hid behind responses such as “It’s the new rule, and there’s nothing I can do about it”. How much investment is made in racecourse staff training? If staff behaviour and training is compared with, say, the leading leisure businesses such as Disney, what conclusions would you draw? I fear the answer would be that far too many of the people employed on racecourses are just not up to the job. 
• Sort out the bars. This is a good example of frontline failure. Amateurish bar staff and completely inadequate routines for serving drinks very quickly is the norm at racecourses. How many times have you heard racegoers complaining while desperately trying to get served between races? Substantial income is lost and customers irritated.
• Sort out the stands and facilities. All too often, racecourses are a strange mish-mash of different stands and facilities that lack any consistent identity, where very different types of customer with different needs collide. If there are different segments, there are clearly different requirements in the various facilities. I have no problems with courses such as Newbury trying (with apologies for the jargon) to “premiumise” their product, but that needs to be done in a way that strongly reinforces both the product and the behaviour that you are trying to engender. At a personal level I love Newbury’s Wine Vault, but then why have second-rate, very loud live music immediately adjacent to it?

That’s it for the moment. I’m very aware that I’ve done no more than scratch the surface. Future blogs will pick up some of these issues in more detail. In the short term, though, I’m looking forward to discussing some of this with Julian Thick and his co-directors at Newbury on what I’m hoping will be a superb day’s racing, Betfair Super Saturday, 8th February. 

I am always interested to hear your views so please do leave a comment. If you can't see the comment box at the bottom of this post then navigate to the post using the right hand navigation or click here > and scroll to the bottom of the page. Look forward to hearing your views. Thanks very much for sharing them.

No More Nonsense at Newbury (or at least for the time being), Part 3 – Understanding the Challenges facing the Racecourse and Putting the Dress Code Fiasco into Context

A large group of us went to Newbury Racecourse on 28th December to cheer on Shantou Magic in the Grade 1 Challow Hurdle. He came 4th, after a very bold and brave attempt to make all. It was a real privilege to be in the winners’ enclosure after a race of this importance – the dream over his long-term future is well and truly alive. He may well race again at the end of the month in a valuable handicap before stepping him back up in grade again. A really exciting day – and fortunately, no silly dress codes to deal with. My wife, Jack, bravely wore exactly the same outfit as on Hennessy day, without incurring the wrath of poorly trained stewards.

During the day I was most impressed that the newly appointed CEO, Julian Thick (former MD of Aintree, Sandown and Kempton Park) went out of his way to track me down and was most generous with his time. We had a long discussion about the dress code, and also the broader strategic development of Newbury. He couldn’t apologise enough for the poor implementation of the dress code, and as compensation is going to provide lunch in the Royal Box on Betfair Gold Cup day, Saturday, 8th February, which is something to look forward to.

In the short term, the dress code has been suspended while Newbury considers what to do next. Defusing this issue and mitigating the PR damage of it was clearly the only sensible option. So what should Newbury do next in terms of customer behaviour and “standards”? Indeed, do you think it should do anything?

I thought an interesting starting point would be to look at the finances of the racecourse. The track is part of Newbury Racecourses plc, a group of companies that own the racecourse and engage in “racing, hospitality and catering retail activities”. Very significantly, in 2012, they entered into a joint venture development agreement with David Wilson Homes for a major redevelopment of the racecourse, together with the construction of 1,500 homes. While there is apparently strong demand for these apartments and houses which are being built along the racecourse, there is much lower demand for actually attending races. In 2012 the track lost £1.2m, although profitability has improved since, with increased media revenues and the securing of longer-term sponsorship deals with the likes of Moet Hennessy, Dubai Duty Free and Bet365. Just like most companies with rising costs and falling revenues, they have completed businesswide reviews to stem the losses and increase the turnover.

Cynics (and there is no shortage of them in our sport) argue that Newbury is now just a real estate asset that happens to have a racecourse at the centre of it. At some stage, do you abandon racing altogether, or let it decline while looking for easy revenue through rock concerts, parties, exhibitions, conferences etc.? Encouragingly (and I’m definitely not in the cynical camp), all the strategic statements within Newbury’s accounts indicate a very robust commitment to quality racing and the Board is chock full of leading owners and racing enthusiasts with considerable business experience. Also they have signed up for the premier tier prize-money agreement with the Horsemen’s Group, which was absolutely the right thing to do.

It seems to me that Newbury is trying to grapple with the broader challenges that face our sport. Attendance is declining, as is individual customer spend. The last thing it wants on the track is drunken, loutish behaviour that will frighten away customers. However the dress code fiasco wasn’t the way to change behaviour. The problem though still exists. With all the rebranding that “The Racecourse, Newbury” is trying to pursue (and whether you believe this is contrived or not is another debate), it only seems sensible that influencing customer behaviour in such a way as to increase and sustain attendance is central to the overall business and financial strategy necessary to ensure that Newbury survives as a top-quality racecourse.

So what should Newbury (and for that matter, other racecourses) do next? All views welcome. I promised to put forward some views in this blog, but after the discussion with Julian Thick I felt it important to put the whole debate into a broader context first.

Nonsense at Newbury – A Self-Inflicted PR Disaster and “The Denim Conspiracy”, Part 1

Newbury was one of the first racecourses that my wife and I visited together, back in 1978. We had just started our careers up in Liverpool and escaped the pressures of the city (this was a couple of years before the infamous Toxteth Riots – and we lived near Toxteth at the time, in Sefton Park) for a weekend in the Cotswolds and a trip to the Hennessy. We saw Bob Champion win on Approaching. Ever since then, it had probably been our favourite racecourse. We had been visiting it regularly for 35 years, and indeed lived only a few miles north on the Woolley Estate for seven years, alongside the famous Woolley Down Gallops where five Derby winners, including Generous and Morston, did their final preparations. Last year we had an Owners for Owners box at the course, and were planning another in 2014.

Notice the use of the past tense. Amazingly, we were caught up in the fiasco of Newbury’s new dress code. I’m going to examine this in some detail over the next few blogs.

On Saturday, 30th November, we held our 7th “Meet the Trainer” morning at Jamie Snowden’s in Lambourn. Lots of owners came down, we had an excellent reviving breakfast at The Pheasant and most of us then went on to Newbury for a great day’s racing. I was aware of the new dress code and had even gone to the trouble of emailing all our owners about it. In their advance publicity they had said that “racegoers are invited to prove that Britain knows best when it comes to Autumnal fashion, with fabulous hats and coats”. I put on my best tweedy outfit and my wife Jack wore a recently purchased coat of blue cotton with leather flashings (ironically bought at Cheltenham Racecourse) and a matching blue trilby (bought at Haydock Park the previous weekend when one of our horses, Quick Decisson, ran there). She was also wearing black trousers, bought specially during the week to ensure that she met the course requirements of “smart trousers, no denim”.

We had both purchased premier badges for the meeting and were admitted to the course in the normal manner. We met up with Philip and Sarah Hobbs in the main grandstand to watch on a TV monitor another of our Owners for Owners horses, Lady Charisma, winning the opening race at Towcester with a typically brave and resolute performance. She is an immaculately bred filly – by Presenting, out of a top-class Cadoudal mare – so to have a first win with her was particularly important, in view of her future breeding potential. All of us were absolutely thrilled and very excited – she got up on the line, to win by a flared nostril!

Not surprisingly, I was then in need of sustenance. I went off to the Champagne Bar in the Wine Cellar in one of the Premier stands to meet up and celebrate with another of Lady Charisma’s owners. Jack went to the paddock to look at the horses for the next race, and then tried to join me. What happened next was spectacularly embarrassing – she was not allowed back into the Premier enclosure. One of the stewards refused her entry because she was deemed to be wearing denim. When Jack protested that she took the prohibition to refer to jeans, he reiterated the refusal by stating that “it’s the rule and you can’t come in”. Unbelievable.

As far as I am concerned, this is the antithesis of everything we are all trying to do in racing. I’m very supportive of any initiatives designed to improve the racegoer experience, encourage more people to come racing and build continuous loyalty and support for our great racing festivals. For the life of me, though, I cannot understand any initiative that results in a mature woman wearing brand-new, smart black trousers, a blue cotton coat (but one that was deemed to be “denim”), with a matching blue trilby, being refused admission to the Premier enclosure and publicly humiliated in this way. Especially as in Owners for Owners we are investing significant sums in racing and doing everything we can to encourage owners to buy more horses and maximise their day-to-day racing experience.

Once I found out about this fiasco, I tracked down the steward; remonstrated with him and his supervisor; then went along to the Newbury office where I was introduced to their ironically-titled “Customer Ambassador”, Alison Brown. She explained that a briefing sheet on the dress code had been sent out by email and that all staff had had a verbal briefing, apparently from the Facilities Manager, Lesley Whittaker. I asked for a copy of the briefing sheet but was not given one. Interestingly, Alison hadn’t been present at the briefing so could not comment on how well it was done, nor whether the subtleties of dress codes were properly explained. I asked to meet Stephen Higgins, the MD of Newbury, but he was unavailable due to being “on duty with the Princess Royal”.

What do you think to this incident? I’ve already had quite a lot of views expressed to me by phone and email. I’ll cover them in Part 2 on this subject. In a lighter moment, a couple of our owners talked of this as a “Denim Conspiracy” and suggested that Owners for Owners buy a horse, name it that, and run it in light blue silks with leather epaulettes. Ha, ha. It’s the only funny thing I can see in what was a really embarrassing experience, and one that I am still pursuing with Newbury.