Will you come on here and wholeheartedly apologise for all you're comments if the tickets come in time?



I think that complaining about something that hasn't happened yet is OTT.

Without a shadow of a doubt I'll apologise for it if they do arrive before Friday but I certainly won't apologise for saying it was a disgrace they didn't let the paying fans know that tickets wasn't available for collection on the 1st like they told us,wasting fans time and money.



I also won't aplogise about my comments about the clubs marketing.

Fine then go support another club. I don't expect you to explain yourself to me, you said enough in your first post on the subject to tell me all I need to know.

Y'see this is the problem people are having with you though Pete, you didn't say that, you said...







Try thinking about what you want to say before letting it all spill out in what just seems like anger-fuelled drivel to others. People will just treat you with equal contempt.



Yes our marketing side has underperformed over the years, especially when directly compared to some other Superleague teams, but with all that has been going on at the club for the past few season's, financially, business wise and in terms of the stadium project, we've no doubt not had the same amounts of money as certain other club's have had to dedicate to the areas of marketing that we're talking about here.



To my mind the club doesn't do a bad job on marketing, they just don't do a fantastic job. Some things to do with the final season at KR where excellent, the heritage shirts and associated merchandise, the events that were held were good and the special programme etc were well produced. Did they milk the opportunity for all it was worth? Honestly no, but then some people would have taken a cynical view if they had done anyway.



The season at Widnes was an unfortunate situation and whilst it may have cost us in certain areas this may have been off-set by the club not having to spend the small fortune in maintenance and repair bills needed for the old ground to scrape through for another safety certificate.



The club has HAD to do things "on the cheap" for years because of the poor financial state the former board/s left the club in. Part of the reason we have been building the new stadium is to provide the club with a surer footing for the future, a future in which we hopefully will be able to channel more money towards marketing etc.



There are a lot of things that go unnoticed by us fans when discussing this topic, we tend to pick out and remember the things that we reckon are bad and happily criticise yet we fail to commend the club with equal gusto for the things they get right. How's about the fact that we never seem to fall short in attracting several shirt sponsors/'partners', or how about the several buses that operate from the town with massive pictures of the players splashed all over them?



If we want the club to improve its communication with fans we need to communicate better with them, we need to stop bitching about them all the time on websites, in the local papers and social media outlets, and provide them with constructive criticism alongside constructive praise.

I didn't say they were shocking. I said marketing has never been a strength at Saints.



And Tony, that is historic. The Council is just as bad. I'm rather thinking that there is something in the water in St Helens which disables the marketing gene. Either that or all our good marketing people leave St Helens for more promising climates.



Saints are good on the corporate side, of late anyway. To pull off the Typhoo shirt sponsorship was very impressive in my view. However, I'm of the view that such corporate nous has more to do with our Chairman and former Chief Exec than it does of our marketing ethos per se.



Mike isn't marketing but media communication, which while tied in is a different beast. But the club is poor on the non-social media side. Only with the build of the new stadium have ads appeared in the Star. And for the many fans who are not Internet savvy there has been no direct communication in years. My parents and other relatives (all of retirement age) have only known about things going on at Saints because I have told them. Even though they are all season ticket holders of many years' standing, the club has not thought them worthy of direct communication in years. That is a poor showing really given the amount of money retired people like them will have poured into the club's coffers over their many years of support.



But still, while it is frustrating that Saints are generally not up to speed on their non-corporate marketing strategy, it isn't worthy of the bile Pete has been emitting recently. Nowhere near worthy.

I've no doubt that is the case. As you've no doubt experienced during your recent period of unemployment there is a huge drain of jobs in the town that don't involve driving a HGV. I doubt there are many businesses left in the town that have a marketing department nor could offer the sort of salary a competent marketing bod could get by commuting to Liverpool, Manchester or elsewhere.







Again I suspect this is the case, put the marketing focus primarily into making the club attractive to investors and sponsors and use the sport side of the club as the key marketing tool to the fans.



I've no doubt the club will improve its communication and marketing to/with the fans in the near future. The recent restructure should help things and the stadium & facilities should serve as a very visual marketing tool in itself.



Mike App does a sterling job in his specific role, I don't know whether he has any support in his position, but at the end of the day he can only do so much.



I honestly don't know what the Marketing team/dept. is like size & structure wise, whether that too is one or two people or a whole group. If the team is small and has to split its time between marketing to sponsors & investors as well as to the team's 1000's of fans I can understand why it may not do things like regular mailshots to fans or weekly poster advertising for games around the town etc as such things take a good deal of time & expense to plan and execute whereas an email mailshot is likely free and takes a bit less time (though this obviously doesn't help the older & non tech-savvy). Of course if we have a large well structured marketing team then it does raise more questions.

If the club knew that season tickets that were bought later would not have been available on the 1st December they should have made that known.



That isn't good customer service and is a simple thing to announce on the myriad of outlets they now have.

Assuming they knew. The tickets only turned up at all on 30 November.

Has that been an official announcement?



I find it hard to believe that the supplier would not have told the club that anything ordered after the cut off date would not be delivered in time for the advertised date of collection.



To say they didn't know, or didn't attempt to find out, suggests incompetency of a high degree in the club to me and whilst there are problems in certain aspects I'm not sure it's that bad.

One of the staff told me when I went to pick up my season ticket on 1 December.





You're happy to think that the supplier is competent but not the club? Interesting.

No, they may well have been delayed, but I'd expect the club to have found out about the delay and informed their customers before the day they had told everyone that they could pick up their tickets.



I'm sure someone finds your unflinching opinion that the club cannot be at fault endearing, alas previous experience has told us that in incidents like this, of poor customer relations, they usually are.