Front row tickets in row G? Give your audience the experience they're expecting

It's the first week of the baseball season, and that means another season of trips down to the ballpark, hot dogs, and some great baseball action.  This morning I was thinking about my beloved Cleveland Indians and my plans to visit Progressive Field a number of times this year.

I love Progressive Field and I think it's a great place to watch a baseball game.  But one thing in particular has always baffled me about this ballpark, ever since I saw the first game played there in 1994.  It's the numbering (or actually lettering) of seating rows.  Depending on where you are in the ballpark, the first row isn't always row A like you might expect it to be.  In fact, the Diamond Box and Field box seats -- the premium seats closest to the field behind home plate and both dugouts -- have a notoriously odd lettering system.  In most of these sections, the first row closest to the field is row F, G, or H.

I know why they assigned the row letters this way (or at least I suspect I know).  Because the ballpark has contours and a unique layout, this type of system makes it easier to create uniformity with all areas of the park.  So the system makes sense from the perspective of allowing row Z in one part of the ballpark to line up with row Z in another part.  But to fans who aren't familiar with row G being the front row, it can seem quite strange -- and it probably hurts the Indians' ticket sales.  I don't understand why the Indians don't make row A the front row around the entire ballpark, since it would 1) conform to fans' expectations that the first row is row A; and 2) it would make every seat more attractive on paper, which might increase the value of those seats and the Indians' revenue as a result.

Whether it's baseball tickets or anything else -- don't forget that when you're marketing, make sure you're giving the customer the experience they're expecting!

Last Friday I was comparing my group's digital marketing materials and media kits.  There are a lot of different sites in the group, and each one is customized to the particular market, as it should be.  But there were a lot of odd differences across the media kits -- similar to the Indians' odd choice of row G as the front row.

• Some of the pricing is expressed in gross terms (before the 15% agency discount) and other prices are expressed in net.
• Web ad specifications don't necessarily agree across the sites, despite the fact that we're using a common platform for ad serving.  For example, some sites list the file size maximum as 25KB, when others say 35KB for the exact same ad.
• And perhaps most puzzling, the same product on two different sites can have two different names -- and the same name might mean two very different things to different sites!  On one site, a 125x125 might be called a "Square Ad", while it's a "Marketplace Ad" on another.  It gets really confusing when a Rectangle Ad means 300x250 on one site, and 180x150 on a different site!

I'll definitely be asking my team to standardize their terminology and ensure it's consistent across the entire group in the future, because otherwise we're presenting information to the market that causes needless confusion.

Are you consistent with the way you present information to your audience?  Does it make sense?  But most importantly, is it the experience they're expecting?  In other words, don't call your front row tickets "row G", otherwise you might be making your job harder for no good reason.

Photo by Chris Metcalf