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Arts marketing has come a long way in the past 30 years. Terry OSullivan marks the highlights and reflects on the new challenges.
You might think that its a bit early in the day to be rethinking an activity that is still hardly out of the professional equivalent of short trousers, but an awful lot has happened to arts marketing since those heady days of the late 1980s when UK arts organisations, riled by political jibes about their welfare state mentality, began to hire marketing managers. I remember it well I was one of them. I joined Derby Playhouse in 1986 fresh from a career marketing chocolate, heralded by the local paper as Yorkie Man. The board looked on nervously as I instigated twofers on Monday nights, cobbled together enough gimmicks (sorry, sales promotions) to drive the box office distracted, and (thank God) squeezed an unprecedented amount of sponsorship out of the captains of East Midlands industry.

Brave new world

They were innocent times. We hardly had what you would call computers, let alone a computerised box office. Todays data-driven sophistication is a million miles away from those long nights spent poring over box office returns and audience surveys. Theres no doubt that the passion and enthusiasm that drove arts marketers in the 1980s is still driving them today, but the job has become so much more complex, as has how we think about audiences and stakeholders more widely. A fundamental change has been the way in which the relationship between marketing and the arts has developed. Long gone are the days of the arts being seen as some kind of poor relation compared to the slick expertise of packaged-goods marketing. The baked beans and soap powder brigade has woken up to the fact that consumers arent buying traditional marketing any more. Surrounded by hyper competition, splintering media and retail meltdown, mainstream marketers are having to look beyond the familiar formula.

Inspirational practice

Marketing gurus are talking about the new service-dominant logic that is driving the experience economy. The customer has become an active partner in value creation rather than the passive recipient of pre-packaged benefits. Does this sound familiar? It should its what marketing the arts is all about. Arts marketers have always been less interested in passive bums on seats than active eyes on stalks. So, increasingly, mainstream marketing thought is looking to the arts for inspiration rather than the other way round. Arts marketings ability to refresh the parts other kinds of marketing cant reach is one source of this inspiration. Social marketing has the power to engage peoples hearts and minds around issues from mental health to urban planning and gets people to change their behaviour in socially beneficial ways. But, like any other kind of marketing in todays crowded environment, it faces challenges in getting and keeping attention and interest, and stimulating action. Its integration with arts marketing can touch people in new ways, and offers exciting possibilities both to artists and to people working for social change. This is an avowedly controversial area, but social arts marketing can introduce a new kind of productive dynamic which is well worth exploring not only for the potential social marketing benefits, but also for the artistic opportunities it presents.

New perspectives

A further development in arts marketing is the way in which it now forces us to look at customers afresh. There is a long-standing tension between developing new audiences and deepening the experience of existing ones (although recent thinking sees the two as complementary rather than competing priorities). Arts marketing now constructs customers in different ways not just as either new or existing. They may be identified by nationhood (consider the role of Scotlands Cultural Commission in reflecting a national customer identity), by artform (how is a film buff defined in the age of digital distribution?), by geography (witness the rise of the cultural quarter and the festival destination as performance spaces in themselves) and even within particular organisations (for example, the relationship between membership schemes and audiences). If one thing unites these various perspectives on customers it is the insight that the most authentic arts marketing meets customers where they are, rather than imposing its own segmentational strait-jacket (as much mainstream marketing still has a tendency to do).

Research agenda

The challenge to researchers now, whether academic or practitioner, is to understand arts marketing on its own terms. If, as we have been arguing, it is distinctive from other forms of marketing because of the ways in which it engages the customer, how best to reflect that distinctiveness in how we investigate it? For example, researching peoples experiences at galleries and museums poses tricky methodological questions. How do you get their permission? How can you record whats going on so that you have usable and representative data? And, crucially, how do you then make sense of it? Methods for this range from the rigorous but almost inexhaustible process of grounded theory (committing to understanding a phenomenon without any preconceptions), to the very precisely limited technique of videography recording, transcribing and minutely analysing small but significant encounters between exhibits, visitors and other visitors. Both have rich insights to offer our understanding of what is going on in how people experience visual arts.

Dr Terry O'Sullivan is Lecturer in Marketing at the Open University Business School. The themes covered in this article have been developed through a two-year international seminar series looking at new ways of understanding whats going on in arts marketing. Developed through a collaboration between six UK universities and funded by the Economic and Social Research Council, the series concludes with Creative Futures Driving the Cultural Industries Marketing Agenda being held on 6 July at the London College of Communication.

w: {htpp://www.lcc.arts.ac.uk/lcc_events_exhibitions.htm}.

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