When Stan Chia joined Vivid Seats in November 2018 as its CEO, he was excited about giving the profitable online ticket marketplace a stronger consumer-facing identity. Stan, who previously held executive roles at Grubhub and Amazon, joined the online ticketing company at a time when the secondary ticket market was growing by double digits year over year. Then the pandemic hit and live events ground to a halt. As Stan puts it, events were the first “to shut down and almost the last to come back.”On this episode of The Empowered Challenger, Stan talks about steering the company through the pandemic and how he’s positioning Vivid Seats to win consumers’ hearts (and dollars) as the pandemic moves into the rearview mirror. With fans excited to get back to concerts, sports and other kinds of live entertainment, Stan says trust is critical when you’re the company selling people their tickets. Consumers want to be assured that gathering in crowds will be done safely and that purchasing tickets is a hassle-free experience from a provider that will stand behind purchases. Even before COVID-19 upended life as we know it, Vivid Seats was building out its loyalty program, which enabled consumers to earn rewards on every transaction. Now, Vivid Seats has enhanced the program in an effort to make it “almost infallible from the value that we deliver to customers,” Stan explains. Now, anyone who uses the Vivid Seats platform earns 10% on every ticket purchase. Plus, the program looks for ways to add “surprise and delight elements,” such as exclusive parties and experiences. It’s part of Stan’s plan to “emerge stronger” from tough times. Tune in to this episode to hear more about how Vivid Seats differentiates itself in the online ticketing space through partnerships with Rolling Stone magazine and more, and why Stan doesn’t believe in focusing too much on competitors (even though he respects what they do). Featured Challenger🧑 Name: Stan Chia⚙️ How he challenges: As the CEO Vivid Seats, an online marketplace for live event tickets, Stan places a significant emphasis on building recognition among consumers looking for a safe and trusted place to get tickets online. 🎟️ Company: Vivid Seats💎 Noteworthy: Stan was born in Singapore and served in the Singapore Armed Forces when he was 18 years old. He learned a lot about leadership during his military service, including the importance of leading by example — “I don't expect anything of anybody that I wouldn't be willing to do myself,” he says. 🔍 Where to find Stan: Twitter | LinkedIn🔍 Where to find Vivid Seats: Twitter | Instagram | Facebook Challenger Wisdom Highlights from the conversation appear below.💡Fans are itching to get back to live events (safely) “What we look at is safety first and foremost, making sure that as we facilitate events like this, that we're really understanding and considerate of comforts and discomforts of customers, right? As the world tries to figure out what the future looks like … there is a huge amount of pent up demand after 14, 15 months of total isolation as we were in lockdown. What we've seen now across the spectrum — music festivals selling out and record pace … there's a lot of excitement from fans to get back, but I think, also, certainly confidence that they can do that and they will do that in a safe way.”💡Leveraging a rewards program as a differentiator “One of the things we decided to differentiate ourselves on was a rewards program….we were one of the only rewards programs out there where every transaction you bought, you would earn something on that. And we said, Hey, also, we're going to build an amazing app. We're going to make sure all of these great personalization features are there. And between August of 2019 through February of 2020, we saw our app volume go from about eight to 9% to 40% of our volume. So huge adoption from consumers … they appreciated the design that our product and our engineering team had put into that as well as the value of our rewards program.”💡People love buying event tickets online — but trust can be a challenge “The challenge in this industry [selling tickets online] … is this a safe industry? Is this a place where you can get tickets? Like, who am I buying from? Who's going to stand behind this? Is it hassle-free? Am I protected as a consumer? I think that's something the industry faces and something that we've really tried to get ahead of.”💡Having a clear brand that resonates with consumers “We want our brand to be synonymous again with consumers when they think about live events. The emotions that we believe we represent to someone who wants to put their faith in us. So trust, value, service, all of these things … we want to make sure that truly our consumers feel that on the brand side … When you think of Vivid Seats, it's about experiencing it live, and celebrating the power of ...
