Research we Need (in Marketing the Arts)

Its time to notch up the science behind marketing the arts. Are your brochures tuned to elicit real responsiveness? Is your web site similarly tuned? Your post cards? Your promotional flashes in any form? Have you used consumer research to maximize your promotions?

I’m constantly surprised by inadequate visuals and graphic elements that are used to sell the world’s most visual and emotional of all products – the arts. My guess is that a lot of the poor field-wide promotions are due to: 1) A reliance on in-kind design or a utilization of lay graphics teams; 2) A lack of belief in marketing as a science, and as such, a portfolio of proven approaches that WILL make a difference if correctly used.

I’m happily posting a link here (see below) to the expert writing of Jean-Pierre Lacroix, President and Founder of Shikatani Lacroix and author of (among other booiks) The Blink Factor (1990), a book that has been on the “favorites” portion of my book shelf since it was published.

In his recent white paper on promotional packaging, Lacroix shares some critical elements of consumer responsiveness that will benefit any arts promotion. For example, he writes that “while consumers typically read from left to right, top to bottom, the research indicates that words are recalled better if they are perceived from the righthand side of the individual, or in the case of packaging, the right side of the face panel. Pictorial or non-verbal cues are more successful if coming from the left-hand side. Brain laterality will only affect material on the outer sides of the pack. There is no evidence of laterality for centralizing elements of packaging.

“In addition, based on other packaging studies, 40% of all communication consumers absorb is visually
oriented, and 80% is driven by the use of color and shape. These insights support the need for
promotional packaging flashes that complement consumers’ absorbtion of information, leveraging how
information is viewed and retained.

“For some packs’ copy, such as brand name or flavor description, it is important to enhance recall and
research suggests that these elements should be placed centrally or on the right-hand side of the pack.
Pack flashes function as pictorial devices despite containing verbal elements, and therefore should be
positioned on the left hand side. Nearly twice as many respondents who saw a promotional flash on the left-hand side of the pack were able to correctly recall the promotion. In addition to its visual effects, packaging also communicates its shape, size, weight, and texture through its tactility.”

Go read the balance of his white paper. Sure, he is writing about cereal packages and how we as consumers make choices as we move through grocery stores. But our field needs this level of detailed examination concerning consumer responsiveness to all sales and promotional materials.

And, by the way, think of testing your promotional materials even when you adhere to the level of science Lacroix describes. When was the last time you used a focus group or consumer panel to evaluate prospective responsiveness to your marketing and promotional materials? Can you be sure you have created materials that enhance recall, that ensure positive response, and that keep yoru targets from wandering somewhere (some other art/entertainment) else?

How many thousands of dollars are you betting on your next season? Can you risk all that expense, and all that revenue to anything less than research-based marketing?

http://www.sldesignlounge.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/11/PromoPackaging.pdf

The 5th P of Arts Marketing

All good marketers know the 4 classic Ps of Marking: product, price, place, and promotion. Today there is a very important 5th P that absolutely has to be added to the classic 4. What is it? Participation. And I don’t mean participation by buying a ticket, being in the audience, or entering the museum. I don’t mean participation as attending a talk-back after a play or a pre-concert lecture about today’s concert choices.

I’m talking about the P of participating pre-ticket purchase, and post-event dialogue. It is a marketing P that you have the power to control and use to boost revenues, increase audience size, and retain interest and loyalty. You can use it across all age groups, and it works just as well with first time single ticket buyers as with long time fans. And, it is a marketing P that you can utilize with no budget!

In this political season, who out there is immune from the adrenaline rush of on-line instant surveying, checking out blog posts, and responding fast and furiously to someone else who just logged in a comment? Harness these same tools for your arts marketing success. The more opportunities you provide for participation in advance of ticket purchase, and then after the event, the more you will keep the interest and loyalty loop working to your advantage.

There are three essential ways to stimulate pre-purchase and post-event participation.

1) Learning.
2) Dialogue.
3) Opinion.

Learning participation is what happens when curiosity is stimulated. Take the dynamic web content of the San Francisco Symphony’s Keeping Score. (www.keepingscore.org) Here, a series of separate web sites – each devoted to a single work of music or composer – all link to or flow from the Symphony’s main web site. Part of the Symphony’s larger multi-year project, inclusive of video documentaries, radio, and guides for teachers, it is a powerful demonstration of how effective it can be to immediately engage someone in learning. Even a first time visitor to the SFO web site can excursion into a great learning experience that leads back to a ticket purchase.

Web sites, email blasts about upcoming events, e-zines, and direct mail can all work toward the same goal of stimulating advance learning participation.

In addition to the multiple web sites option employed by the SFO, we like E-zines – a regularly scheduled “magazine” of content – that can be a powerful step up from simple email postcard reminders. Try alternating email and e-zines, or getting email patrons to click over to an e-zine. E-zine buyers will get more drawn in by participating in learning, and will be more motivated to buy tickets. Keep your e-zine-ing manageable. Don’t set an impossible schedule. Monitor your box office around e-zine release dates to find out what content, length, and style works best for your audience.

Dialogue participation is what your organization can gain through blogs, social networks, and community sites. A blog linked to an arts organization web site can create dialogue participation opportunities on a daily or weekly basis, with virtually no cost to your organization. Suddenly, you aren’t constrained by a static web site. Use your e-mailings and snail mailings, along with your website prompts and hyperlinks to move your audience/prospective audience right over to your blog. Use your blog, in turn, to stimulate dialogue. Ask questions. Facilitate discussion. Not everyone will go to the blog, and fewer will join the dialogue. But for those who are passionate, opinionated, or just want to weigh in, dialogue creates community, belonging, and ownership. Major corporations world-wide are using dialogue communities the way they used to use focus groups, gathering perceptions and advice they put to use in future brand, image, message, and even product development. Your organization can use the same technique for continuous research as well as a powerful affiliation-building method.

Opinion participation is the easiest and fastest way to stimulate ownership and investment. If your organization sends out emails or snail mails about upcoming events, you can – and should – be inserting questions on a regular basis. Post-event follow up is important, too. Keep the questions short and to the point. Don’t be afraid to ask “why?” Don’t go for a 15 page survey. Stick to a single topic, and a couple of questions – for example, focus on box office/admissions one time, on the event experience another. Remember that the goal is to gain the interest and involvement of people who are responsive because they’ve given their opinion. Thank them. Let them know you really use their input.

The outcome of these three approaches is an involved, more educated, opinionated, and caring audience member. It is increased ticket sales, increased frequency of attendance. It is word of mouth that translates into box office success.

Remember, build participation in advance of ticket purchase, and again after the event, to reap the rewards of the 5th P of arts marketing.

The Web and Shopping for Arts Events

Yesterday’s blog brought so many emails to my inbox that it opened the door for deep conversation about the web’s importance for prospective ticket purchasers. The importance of the web as a part of totally integrated multi-channel marketing is huge! So let’s dig in a little more today by turning to a resource I couldn’t live without, the incredible research reports from the Pew Internet & American Life Project. They should be a bookmarked read for every arts marketer. (I’ve included links to a couple of key recent reports in my blogroll.)

I’ve recently been fascinated by the implications of John B. Horrigan’s May 18, 2008 report for Pew on “The Internet and Consumer Choice: Online Americans use Different Purchase Strategies for Different Goods.” Horrigan studied music purchasers to see how they buy music, which has immediate implications for those in our field who are selling tickets to live performing arts – as well as to the packaging of digital music.

Herrigan proves the point of multi-channel marketing, noting that 51% of music buyers report offline sources as “more influential than the internet in shaping their choice of music purchase.” He goes on to say that, “in general, 62% of music buyers who used the internet to learn about music say an offline source mattered most as compared to 32% who said something on the internet made most difference.”

So, okay, the brochure and direct mail targeting still matter. So does the non-web advertising strategy, as Horrigan points out that ads and WOM are still primary influencers for music purchase.

But the web is a huge factor, particularly for web-savvy consumers. Note, the web, not just email. Here’s what Horrigan reports:

56% of music buyers say they watch a music video of the song or artist, some of which may be online videos, before the purchase.

44% have done at least one online activity relating to their music purchase, such as going to an artist’s web site or reading blogs about the artist or band.

The web is particularly important in reinforcing what Horrigan refers to as the “experience good” of music. (Actually, Horrigan rightly quotes Carl Shapiro and Val Varian’s “Information Rules” (Harvard Business School Press) in that term. An experience good such as music – or one might argue, a ticket to a play or a trip to a museum – “has a quality that is difficult to determine before the purchase, which makes sampling very important to the purcahse.”

So Horrigan notes that among music buyers, 39% go to the artist web site to “connect directly with artists.”

28% look online for live performances by the artist.

13% post their own reviews to places like Facebook.

And, 26% say that on-line resources led them to buy more music.

Seems pretty straight forward to us. Good use of the web in marketing arts events and tickets is more than sending email reminders for upcoming concerts. Add links to artist web sites. Add links (not just program notes) to your web site to satisfy web users’ insatiable need for research resources. Add you blog about the upcoming event, and/or your guest artists’ own blogs. Find better and better ways to let that need for “sampling the experience good” be satisfied. Sure, that sound bite of the Symphony or the new production of Lucia is a great start. But more is better. And, make sure to add opportunities for what Horrigan calls “post purchase” interaction. He notes that “Alexander Grahanm Bell was the first to see that communication technology might change the communal nature of listening to music, as he thought the telephone would be used to let people gather to listen to concerts happening on other places. The internet turns Bell’s vision on its head… (in part because) they can virtually gather in cyberspace to talk about it.”

What are you doing to foster that post event chatter?

Cross Channel Arts Marketing

Getting cross channel right is key to selling more tickets. In simple retail terms, cross channel shoppers are those who investigate before buying, relying on the full triangle of information triggers: the store, the web site, and the catalogue. And in the retail business, it has been pretty well proven that cross channel buyers spend more, are vastly more loyal, and make more frequent purchases.

So how do the arts create good cross channel buyers?

1) Think about how the catalogue (brochures) support the web, and how both are supported by the store (destination/box office.) The messages, the look, the call to action, the ability to satisfy the customer should be consistent. That means regular updates to the web, matched by periodic updates/new versions of the catalogue. Yup, new covers and inside front pages of the “catalogue” a couple of times a year, to drive people back to the web site, also with fresh content.
2) Think about prompting purchases at key times during the year. Did you know that good cross channel shoppers are 110% more likely to purchase from catalogues than non-cross channel shoppers? Basically, that catalogue you get from Restoration Hardware is prompting you to get back on line, check things out in depth, and then finally make that purchase you’ve been putting off.
3) Make the web experience terrific, fresh, and deep. There are many tremendous arts web sites with great content. (The Mesa Arts Center’s interactive brochure this year is terrific! Fabulous job, Randy!) Think of the customer who looks things through in the catalogue, goes on line, zeros in on the lamp he wants to buy, zooms in for a closer look, gets to then zoom in for detailed product information, more background and even more background, until he is satisfied that this is indeed the lamp to buy rather than that other lamp over at that other store/catalogue/web site. Don’t imagine for a monent that your customers aren’t doing exactly that kind of comparison shopping! They are, even for a $25 ticket for Saturday night.
4) Knowth thine customer. The more you know about the customer, the more you will be able to segment your customer base into four or five manageable slices and target them with the right catalogues at the right frequency. This isn’t always as easy to do as it might seem. Right now, we’re working at creating a single analysis database out of one major presenting organization’s three years of Ticketmaster box office transactions – none of which are linked together. (More on creating a viable customer database at another time… Sometimes, the back office is the most important office in marketing.)

There are real implications here.

1) Question the viability of a single season mailer. Would you buy as much if you only got one Bloomies catalogue a year? Make them different sizes, different thickness, different content.
2) Change the web to match the changed catalogue. Allow for new zooms in, more depth, special deals, new features. Assume that at this point your buyer is actively doing comparison shopping.
3) Build customer intelligence files.

There’s a great IBM publication on cross channel marketing. Check out the link to the left.