Andrew McIntyre and Helen Dunnett offer a new approach to audience development.
Five years ago the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra was in trouble. Two decades of ?status quo? marketing had failed to engage a whole generation of potential concert-goers. As the audience aged, the subscription base began to ebb away and the battalions of group bookers that once thronged the ?Classics? concerts dwindled to a few hardy veterans.
Box office database marketing to the rescue then? Er, actually, no. Just like in most performing arts organisations, ?best practice? arts marketing has been disastrous. Sure, it?s created a core of loyal, high frequency, subscribing super-attenders. But at what price? For every core attender there are three irregular attenders, six that we haven?t seen for a year or two and twenty that we don?t even mail anymore.
These aren?t just figures from the Royal Liverpool Phil. They come from a survey of over thirty venues with box office databases across the UK. What we?re talking about here is systematic audience underdevelopment. How on earth has this happened?
Brilliant brochures?
It seems that brochures are brilliant for the tiny core audience. But they don?t do anything for most of the people on the database. We can prove it: they don?t book. After they ignore a few brochures, we punish them by ?cleaning? these dirty past attenders from our pristine databases. After all, we do have standards, and some people simply don?t deserve our information. Even the usual suspects ignore the brochure. We can prove it: we have to send them follow up mailings. It seems that 95% ignore these too. Most direct mail letters are dreadful. Sorry, but it?s true. They?re clichéd and hackneyed. They come from the cut and paste, find and replace school of copywriting. Dull, dull, dull, not to mention formulaic, predictable and patronising. Letters that go straight in the bin rarely prompt bookings.
Not doing very well, are we? Let?s just re-cap. We?ve ex-communicated 70% of the database for failure to respond. At least 80% of those who are left ignore the brochure. We then target the crème-de-la-crème of those most likely to book with a highly targeted follow up mailing. And 95% ignore it. Still think box office marketing is efficient and effective? Neither do we.
What?s going wrong?
It is neatly summed up by the difference between selling and marketing. Selling serves the needs of the seller ? fill those empty seats, hit that box office target. Marketing meets the needs of the buyer by understanding their motivations, behaviour and responses.
We need to stop selling tickets at the database and start helping individual audience members to buy them. That?s more than just semantics. It?s a whole audience-focused philosophy. It?s real audience development and what we are developing are relationships that yield loyalty, frequency and risk-taking. The philosophy is backed up by a whole audience-focused science: Customer Relationship Management (CRM).
Totally systematic
The Audience Builder System is all about bespoke Customer Relationship Management and is the culmination of several years? work by Morris Hargreaves McIntyre. It has been developed for, with and by the arts sector, and pioneered at the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra, and it is now being rolled out across the UK and attracting interest in the United States and Australia as well. Audience Builder is a complete, integrated system that aims to deliver the audience and financial targets that organisations need by targeting campaigns at those most likely to buy, even if they?ve not bought anything similar before. It also informs planning, helps marketers to manage their brand, monitors performance and produces clear, understandable reports. In short, it is a personal development plan for each and every member of the audience.
Driven by data
At the heart of the system is sophisticated segmentation. We analyse box office data to identify and define distinct segments with different behaviour, motivations, attitudes, needs, and responses. We then set specific objectives and targets for each segment and devise detailed marketing strategies and plans to achieve them. Everything can be and is differentiated: the product, the price, the promotion ? indeed the whole marketing mix. Goodbye one size fits all, hello relevant and persuasive.
At the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra, we?ve broken all the rules. We?ve slashed the number of brochures. We?ve scrapped the ineffective ladder adverts. We?ve done away with the old-fashioned direct mail letters and replaced them with evangelist, celebratory messages that are genuinely personal from us, rather than superficially personal to them. We?ve even started ringing the audience for a chat.
The results are spectacular. At campaign level we know the exact return on investment. It?s doubled or tripled. At strategy level the organisation is transformed. The 14,000 new attenders mean that the audience has grown by a staggering 44% in three years. Retention is up. Frequency is up. Seat occupancy is up by 13%. Ticket yield is up by 14%. There are 1,600 new subscribers. A quarter of the audience has been persuaded to try more challenging concerts. These are the vital signs of a healthy audience. The Orchestra is truly re-inventing itself for the 21st Century.
Miracle cure?
This is no miracle. It results from a deep understanding of the audience, sophisticated segmentation, a totally strategic approach, application of innovative audience development techniques and lots of very hard work by the team at the Royal Liverpool Phil.
Audience Builder is more than just a few ideas, tips and tricks. For organisations to become official Audience Builder sites requires a fundamental change to the way they plan, budget, communicate and monitor. Several sites, for example, have had to change staff job descriptions to meet the increased data needs. The conversion process should not be underestimated and needs very careful planning. It has been likened to the challenge of changing box office systems ? a challenge that?s always worthwhile in the end.
Contact Andrew McIntyre
t: 0161 839 3311;
e: andrew.mcintyre@lateralthinkers.com,
or Helen Dunnett
t: 0151 210 2915;
e: helen.dunnett@liverpoolphil.com