The future will be psychographical
Sara Leonard argues audience segmentation along demographic lines is oversimplifying and takes us through the steps of psychographics, which promise a more nuanced understanding of audiences.
When we talk about who makes up the audience for the arts, demographics reign supreme. We roll our eyes a little, lower our voices a little, or get frustrated and indignant a lot talking about age, sex, income, and race. Within arts organizations, we often believe we can eyeball the demographics of our audience, know who is and is not attending, and set about to develop our audiences accordingly.
Here’s the problem with focusing our conversations about audience development on demographics, though. When we break audiences down along solely demographic lines we risk oversimplifying what makes people who they are. I’d probably be a bit taken aback if someone said to me, “Sara, you’re a woman. That tells me everything I need to know about you! Here’s what you’ll like and dislike. For example, I know you will automatically like anything that has to do with other women.” Replace “woman” in the above sentences with my race, age, marital status… you get the idea. Put this way it seems almost absurd, and yet all too often we see well-intentioned arts organizations implementing marketing tactics that seem to reflect this kind of thinking, however inadvertently.
People enter into relationships with other people and with organizations because they share interests and values. The principle applies within the arts, too. Our arts organizations need to have clear and consistent organizational identities that are expressed in our missions, programming, and marketing, and we need to know how the organization’s personality intersects with those of our audience members. In order to do that, we need to understand their interests, values, likes, and dislikes so that we can most effectively relate to them. To use the lingo, we’re talking here about psychographics. Keep reading on National Arts Marketing Project
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