The stock-in-trade of the arts sector is imagination, creativity and engagement with the emotions, yet Howard Raynor says arts organisations have become fixated with targets, social engineering and performance indicators. Are they missing a trick?
Advertising has become a blur. TripAdvisor now provides a peer-to-peer lowdown on just how good a four star hotel really is. We create our own advertising media and post it where we see fit: MySpace, Flickr, YouTube. Some of this consumer controlled content is breathtakingly good, a real inspiration. Some of it is appalling beyond comparison, but the idea that we can segment and target audiences is truly finished.
Kevin Roberts fascinating book Lovemarks: The Future Beyond Brands1 sets out the new terrain in the adroit manner that only a Chief Executive at Saatchi & Saatchi could. Glittering with quotes and hand-picked examples, in an imaginative book Roberts gives us an X-ray view of the communication challenge ahead. His main thrust is that trademarks gave way to brands and brands themselves are giving way to a more attraction-based relationship with consumers. Whatever you may think of Saatchi & Saatchi, he sets some excellent practical questions, such as how many screens do you own, and how many do you see on an average day? For my own part I confess to owning five and seeing probably ten in the average day. He also asks some serious questions about how sight, sound and motion are being combined to create ever more aspirational stories for the products and services we use.
I agree with Roberts view that, in the UK, brands mainly do what they say. Bottled water, no matter what you purchase at the end of the day, is an emotional buy. As consumers we are past the point of rational decision. I have long maintained that we spend most of our lives in our memories and thinking about imagined futures. We dont spend our time doing a spectral analysis of all the bottled water in the marketplace, so we can buy exactly the right stuff for us. We buy on the basis of whats available, or as a result of emotional choice, and we arent very loyal. Malcolm Gladwell, author of Blink2, was interviewed by Roberts for The Lovemarks Effect3 and pointed out that loyalty is not as high on our list of concerns, as it is on the list of manufacturers concerns. He said: I&think that a lot of the time people see loyalty where loyalty does not exist. Often what looks like loyalty is simply habit or unthinking allegiance. The effect is the same but the condition is different. When we do have choice we tend to buy on the basis of trust or emotional attachment but not really loyalty.
If Roberts is correct and he marshals a lot of talent into his book to support the argument that emotion, mystery, sensuality and intimacy are the golden fleece of future communications then the arts could have a massive moment of opportunity. The currency of the arts visual, performance, educational, you name it is about engagement with the human condition. Our daily work takes us into the world of mystery, emotions, physical movement, imagination. No one is more qualified to address the issue than the arts.
Heres the rub. Whilst advertising and commerce have been sweating it out over the experience economy and the attraction economy, the arts have been focused on public service agreement targets, social engineering and infrastructure. We should be 100% focused on bringing the audiences close to the arts. We should be giving the audience the meaning, insight, fun, passion, devotion, romance and social situation that only the arts can deliver. Technology is no answer: its the content that steals the show.
The Sony Viera adverts were a breakthrough, not just for Jose Gonzales as a songwriter, but in terms of the imagination to create the advertisement in the first place: they really did release all those superballs down a street. Tony Wilsons In the City Conference in 2005 pointed out that music licensing, particularly with regard to film, was going to change the face of pop music. Two years later the landscape of TV advertising has changed; new talent is constantly popping up in the world of consumer advertising. Film is undergoing the same changes.
Arts organisations are uniquely placed at the centre of this fast developing communications revolution; the question is how good are we at capitalising upon this? Do we remain relevant, contemporary and interesting? Do we accept the emotional mission? Do we engage with the qualities that brought us into the arts in the first place or will we continue to slog through key performance indicators, public service agreement targets and best value assessments as if these were important?
You only need to look at some of the arts infrastructure websites and look at how respected arts organisations are communicating to see the gulf between what we create or show and how we put it across. We are missing a huge trick. Our currency principles, imagination, emotions, human dynamics, stories should put us at the centre of the debate. We have unbelievable richness in terms of audience connection, but the advertising world looks set to write the book for us. We need to become much more savvy in the communications game. We can personalise the game, we can explore issues with more confidence and integrity than anyone else and yet we keep our heads down and worry about the money.
There will be organisations that fully adopt these new business principles and create memorable and distinctive audience experiences, and there will be the bureaucratic leviathans who remain 20 years behind the times. Fortunately like everything else in this world its a choice, and I look forward to seeing how arts organisations rise to the challenge.
Howard Raynor is Managing Director of World Class Service Ltd.
t: 0161 456 6007;
e: howard@worldclassservice.co.uk;
w: http://www.worldclassservice.co.uk
1 Roberts, K. (2004) Lovemarks, The Future Beyond Brands, PowerHouse Books
2 Gladwell, M. (2005) Blink: the power of thinking without thinking, Allen Lane
3 Roberts, K. (2007) The Lovemarks Effect, PowerHouse Books