Devoted to Managers and those that seek to improve their management skills

Any business is dependent on its success from its core customer base. The majority of decisions we make should be connected to making sure they're served well above anything else.

The "Best of Both Worlds" tour by Hannah Montana star Miley Cyrus, and the one-time concert being offered by Garth Brooks, gives a case study in things we can do to ensure we offer a great experience for our base.

In this case, both artists faced the same challenges: they wanted their fans to have access to tickets. The promotion people for Miley Cyrus weren't able to deliver on that promise, while the Garth Brooks camp did.

The solution in this case was very simple. The Garth Brooks promotion team understood what challenges the Internet offered them, as scalpers were ready to consume a huge portion of the tickets available. To remedy that, Brooks insisted his team offer tickets for sale in physical locations so his fans had a good chance to purchase tickets for the concert.

The Cyrus camp offered an interesting thing for the same purpose, by offering a "Hannah Montana" fan club membership, where people could join and get first choice on tickets. The idea was a good one, but it failed because they had no checks and balances in place to manage ticket sales.

It looks like what happened is resellers simply joined the club themselves, and bought up the majority of tickets before real fans could. It caused a lot of disappointment and bad will as prices are now so high many young families can't afford them. So what was a good idea, turned into a negative because it wasn't thought through clearly and things put in place to protect the integrity of the fan club.

This was pretty much a management failure on the part of promoters for Cyrus' concert. It was a simple concept they had, and it's not that difficult to anticipate what would happen if they didn't have measures in place.

It's no different then if we offer loss leaders to attract customers. We put limits on them so the majority can partake in the savings.

That's all that would have been needed to be done here. Just put a limitation on the tickets sold per person, and the majority of the problem would have been taken care of.