Doug McLennan provokes a rather central question in his blog post this week: are arts organizations in the business of selling tickets? Says he:
If you believe your business model is the classic consumer transaction
(I make the performance, you buy the ticket) then you’re done. Sorry.
He goes on to suggest that arts organizations are providing a much more complex service than a play or a performance or an exhibition, and that arts consumers are seeking a complex bundle of goods in their purchase decisions.
People aren’t comparing you with other orchestras or theatre or dance
companies; they’re measuring whether classical music or theatre or
dance is something they want to choose at the moment. They’re deciding
whether they want an active or passive experience; they’re trying to
determine what level of social encounter they feel like today. They’re
weighing whether they want a predictable, known, comfortable quantity
or whether they want to be adventurous and try something new.
His provocation is right on the mark, and central to any thoughtful discussion of the future of arts enterprise and cultural management. But I’d suggest that it’s missing an important wrinkle.
The deeper challenge for arts organizations is that they DO sell a product, even as they DON’T. That is, an important segment of any arts audience doesn’t recognize the complex bundle they’re seeking when they buy a symphony or theater ticket. They’ve come to use that event as a placeholder or proxy for that bundle, without even knowing it. To this core group (often the most passionate about the art form, the most loyal buyers, the most committed donors) the bundle IS the product. And as you innovate around the delivery or context of your creative work, you challenge their passionate connection to the discipline’s tradition.
It’s not necessarily a generational divide, although generation cohort likely plays a part. But rather it’s a challenge of serving multiple audiences with widely varying interests and expectations.
In the corporate world, Chief Information Officers continually battle with ‘legacy systems‘ — software, hardware, and processes that are out-dated and cumbersome, but that still provide familiar and reasonably functional services. I’d suggest that Doug’s perspective on the product/service/process quandary for arts organizations is absolutely true, but compounded by the many ‘legacy systems’ and ‘legacy audiences’ that formed our organizations and continue to support them.
There’s clearly a need to redefine and reframe what an arts organization delivers, and why people recognize the value of that effort with their time, attention, and money. But we’re not so fortunate to have a clean break and a fresh start.
Great points, particularly as I make my way through the fantastic Canadian series “Slings and Arrows” (about the travails of a theatre company similar to the Stratford Festival). You’ll laugh, you’ll cry, you’ll wish you had more big donors.
I guess the answer to this question could be as complicated as some of the calculus needed to figure out the problems in the first place, but given the challenge of these multiple audiences, how often can an organization really step back and evaluate whom they serve, whom they want to serve, and how they serve them?
Season 2 (the Macbeth series) hits this pretty hard 😉
I think the most problematic legacy system we’re dealing with is an arts communication model that’s stuck in the mid 20th century.
Old-model arts marketing adheres to a formula that says: boast about yourself as broadly as your budget allows and hope you hit enough people who care. It was a formula that worked well, of course, when the marketplace was full of arts consumers who were self-motivated enough to respond.
But boasting alone doesn’t work on under-motivated arts consumers in an intensely competitive environment. As you and Doug both mention, at some point you have to tell these consumers why they should choose you over the alternatives – what’s in it for them – and juicy quotes from The New York Times simply don’t do that.
Doug mentions Barack Obama in his post, who said repeatedly throughout his campaign, “This is not about me; this is about you.” Maybe we need to stop talking about ourselves for a while and start talking about how our products satisfy the needs and desires of our various target audiences.
The companion question that should also be mined by arts groups is “Why DO people Buy”. The field of Neuromarketing/Neuroscience marketing should be built in to the marketing message and branding of each arts company.
As artists we work often to create on the level of the unmitigated unconscious and subconscious, we know how to do that. Why not create a (repeatable/memorable) tag line and defining statement for the company that is as deep reaching . I teach my entrepreneurial clients how to capture the essence of their services in a process based on my theater character development. It becomes the gift that keeps on giving because people love to repeat it and be the influential who can tell you where you can get the solution you are looking for.
A hint as to why people buy? The “What’s in it for me?” It has very much to do with seeking redemption. What do YOU save people from?
The company that gets behind that one will thrive.
“Slings & Arrows” is my personal DVD addiction! Of course, I’m Canadian, and so have a certain bias, but its writers’ art is terrific and with both comedy and profundity they ask about the Canadian version of everything Andrew mentions here. And in series 3, they ask what happens when artists and their directors cannot handle both their ongoing and various needs to transform personally and also do their work.
If arts management today means bundling audience perks, smart packaging, psychological analysis, trend charts, streetscape flows, seeking “what would Google do”, managing theatre shop products, designing tshirts and toys, so be it. If our audiences are so starved of the arts they can’t absorb them any longer unless they’re massaged, then we’ve got a crisis of education -not of management. But the second that business and marketing work slides under the theatre’s closed doors and dark rehearsal rooms, then the artists are failed. If a manager believes that, beyond his own job to sell tickets, that it is also the job of the art itself and its artists to market, sell, entertain, and market on stage, and if artists move to obey, then arts managers have actually left the world of art management. I think the phrase is-‘sold out’. Managers would be better to do what Paul Gross as the artistic director in “Slings & Arrows” did -manage a company in Montreal called “Theatre sans Argent” (without money).
We sell, but we don’t. A very interesting and quite true tangle. If you’re bottom line is the ticket you’re done for, and yet you’re done for without the ticket…. And what’s the answer?
As things get scarier (we deal primarily with drama teachers who are losing their jobs left right and centre) we’re trying to focus on who we are ‘beyond’ being a bookstore. We sell scripts. Great. But what are we beyond that. I think if we can push forward with that in mind, rather than the dollars and cents, we’ll see the other side. That’s the theory. 🙂