WWE's business decisions

[Kane Knight]

Originally Posted by Chavo Classic The tours are generally successes. Europe usually sells out and there are major gains in Merchandise sales as everyone wants a souvenir of the night the big time American game came to their town. However, the WWE can't go jump across the Atlantic or Pacific every week to boost their profits. It's a gruelling schedule for the roster to be put through, and it must cost a fair amount too. This is perhaps one of the reasons why a UK territory was being discussed up until recently. Build up a local, low-cost roster and send over the occassional big name to hype up interest. It's better in the long run the WWE attend to problems at home. The overseas markets, because they are visited less frequently, will always be there.

It's been reported several times lately that attendences were down in the UK shows, with tickets not selling out. While the numbers are still good, it really does demonstrate that the more they go overseas, the less successful each tour will be. It's a factor of diminishing returns.

Originally Posted by Chavo Classic That's true. It's not enough to say 'hey, kids, look at this wrasslin over here' and expect an influx of attention and dollars. But at the moment that's probably the direction they're going at. In the spectrum between the gimmicky early 90s and thr Attitude of the late 90s, they're probably leaning more towards the former. This is their problem. Just because it worked then, doesn't mean it'll work again. They need to get on an entirely different tangent, aiming to appeal to the new iphone generation rather than their previous SNES generation.

Part of the problem is they're repeating that generation entirely, which is the equivalent of trying to market the 80s to a 00s generation.

Anyway, the kids will enjoy it, at least short term. But if Vince gets complacent, as he always seems to do when things "Go Well," then we could see problems for WWE down the line.

Originally Posted by Chavo Classic Maybe when Smackdown leaves CW, we'll see an earlier change in scheduling. You heard it speculated here first.

I still say Raw should be moved to 7 PM so that the kiddies can see Cena. It makes no sense to market a 9 PM cable show to children. Though the fact that they market stuff to the kids and then feature scantily clad whores, incest, racism, etc. still kinda baffles me.

One of the interesting things about merch is the number of people who seem to buy it who have little or no interest in the product itself. It's especially true of the video games, but there are a ton of people out there who buy the T-Shirts and such without knowing fuck all about the programming. It just looks cool or whatever.