The latest research from marketing:arts (p3) has neatly quantified something that arts marketers have been aware of ever since computerised box office systems enabled them to track precisely who books tickets and how often.
It will come as no real surprise to them that, on average, well over half of their tickets are booked by around 10% of their customers. Whilst arts managers in recent years have, largely with the support of government and funders, successfully managed to attract huge numbers of new attenders and participants, it is now clear they are effectively facing a bucket of sand with a great big hole in the bottom, evidenced by the persistently low rate of repeat visits. Initiatives such as Operatunity, Classic FM Families and Millennium Music Live (p16) can contribute much to the process of shovelling ever more sand into the bucket, but then it?s down to arts organisations themselves to transform these new arts attenders into arts enthusiasts who will come back to them time and again. Fixing the hole at the bottom of the bucket must be a priority, and the moment has surely arrived to start pumping resources into finding out why they don?t come more often (and doing something about it). But do we really want to hear all of the answers? For example, what if we find that lot of people simply don?t enjoy the arts as much as they enjoy football, and don?t attend very often for fear of spending a lot of money and then not enjoying themselves? Do we really want to know that people find our publicity materials dull, and that they think we?re too expensive ? or elitist? Do we really want to know that there is nothing in our season brochure that matches up to the prospect of an evening of good comedy on the TV? No. But if we really want to address the issue of low repeat business and create arts enthusiasts from our arts attenders, we may have no alternative but to take a long hard look in the mirror.