Arts Marketing Insights: The Dynamics of Building and Retaining Performing Arts Audiences by Joanne Scheff Bernstein.
The US view of the state of the arts is not good. Diane Ragsdale of the Andrew Mellon Foundation told the Scottish Arts Council Audience Development Forum in November of last year that the 30 years arts bubble has burst: corporate America is by-passing arts and culture because science and technology is the new zeitgeist . This, combined with declining and ageing audiences, and the failure to adapt or understand, left her with a sense of crisis. Also in November, Russell Willis Taylor, speaking in New York at the Arts Reach National Arts Marketing Conference, asked how many arts organisations mission was to play to as few people as possible. Her perception was that too many arts organisations thought marketing was a necessary evil.
This context is important because in his foreword to Arts Marketing Insights, Professor Philip Kotler, (with whom Scheff Bernstein wrote the seminal Standing Room Only) says the book is the performing arts bible for the times& insensitivity to the ways customers prefer to do business and the types of messages that will serve to attract audience members is actually creating barriers to attendance. She herself writes in her introduction the antiquated mind-sets and approaches of many managers and marketers are putting many arts organisations at risk of failure.
So her book is about re-thinking arts marketing for the 21st century and developing innovative approaches around new technologies. It is very much a book for the times, since it offers an in-depth analysis of current behaviour patterns and attendances, and of the character and mind-set of actual and potential performing arts audiences. This provides the framework to strategic marketing to define, deliver and communicate value. There is a welcome emphasis on customer-relationship management, database-driven marketing and building customer loyalty.
Scheff Bernstein suggests that, to be customer focused, arts organisations should forget the four Ps and use the four Cs: customer value (not product), customer costs (not price alone), convenience (not place) and communication (not promotion).
There is a healthy international dimension to the book and it addresses the conflict some organisations seem to have between focusing on the subscriber at the expense of the focus on the single ticket buyer. This is an essential read, guaranteed to challenge and to stimulate thinking, full of effective insights. I use farming analogies for audience development: Scheff Bernstein quotes Voltaire: We must cultivate our garden.
Review by Roger Tomlinson.
e: rtomlinson@actconsultantservices.co.uk