My Twitter friend @jamesdoeser mentioned a few weeks ago that research often tells us that the product we think we’re selling isn’t the one our customers are buying. And he offers up this example:

“You think you’re offering X artist; what your customer is buying is a dignified way to spend a wedding anniversary.”

I love the anniversary example for two reasons: One is that the arts industry squanders a astonishing amount of precious resources promoting organizational anniversaries that have essentially no persuasive influence on audiences. The other is that customers are more likely to buy tickets to celebrate their own anniversaries than they are to celebrate ours. It’s a poignant illustration of the egocentrism that underlies cultural sector communications and the simple fact that what we’re trying to sell and what they’re interested in buying are often very different things.

I mentioned in passing once that one of my favorite ways to pre-test a marketing message is to imagine someone in a focus group expressing it in the form of a personal yearning. If you’re considering basing an upcoming promotional campaign on a benchmark anniversary, for example, picture yourself sitting behind a two-way mirror listening to a group of people who look just like the younger, more culturally diverse audiences you’d like to see in your venue and imagine one of them saying:

“When I’m looking for a way to spend a night out with friends listening to live music, I always look for an arts organization that’s celebrating an anniversary because an organization’s anniversary is so much a part of the experience my friends and I expect when we go out.”

If it sounds silly and you can’t imagine a real person saying it – or stopping for a second to even think about it – it’s probably not a very persuasive message to publish in your ticket sales materials.

If you can’t afford focus groups, this little thought experiment is an easy way to avoid self-centered messaging that has no persuasive resonance with new audiences. Try it on just about any promotional idea and you’ll find that it’s a useful tool.

But there’s a catch. It’s one thing to imagine briefly what focus group participants would never say and another thing entirely to imagine what they would say. One of the most counterproductive traditions in arts management is our tendency to sit in conference rooms dreaming up what outsider audiences might want using our elite insider’s perspectives as a filter. The only way to know what new audiences want is to find actual human beings who represent our new target audiences and ask them.

In all likelihood what they’ll talk about are things that are important to them – things that relate to their personal experiences or that satisfy their individual needs, wants and desires.

“When my husband and I look for ways to celebrate our anniversary, we usually choose something special like a concert or play. You know, something out of the ordinary and maybe a little fancier than what we normally do.”

Research results will vary from market to market and from one institution to another, but if there’s one constant that runs through all research results, it’s that when it comes to what motivates people to buy our products – especially new audiences – it’s all about them.

History may tell us that one of the greatest tragedies in the arts was that our generation gambled away the survival of professional art forms on the promise of amateur marketing.

Classical concert music, for example, employs the most talented, highly trained, technically proficient professional musicians in the world, yet we market their output with the efforts of workers who rank nowhere near the top of the marketing profession. Arts marketing is somewhat of an oddball in the broader marketing realm. It stands apart from the mainstream, it answers to its own set of quirky norms and traditions, it doesn’t evolve with the markets it expects to influence and it takes its marching orders from executive leaders who have no particular expertise. Unlike artists who at the top of their professions work for nonprofit arts organizations, marketers at the top of their profession work in successful businesses, corporations and political campaigns where strategic communications are far more sophisticated.

I mean no disrespect to arts marketers. There are many talented, trained, experienced, technically proficient arts professionals who do marketing, but the standards the cultural sector expects from marketing fall so far short of the standards upheld by the marketing profession in general that any critical comparison will reveal a disturbing imbalance.

What fascinates me about this imbalance is that amateur marketing is so deeply ingrained in the culture of culture that we rarely, if ever, step back to consider the damage it might be doing – or bother to ask if we should expect our communications staff to perform at the same level of professionalism as their counterparts on the stage. Venerable institutions that represent the highest imaginable achievements in artistic excellence are teetering on the verge of insolvency because they can’t sell enough tickets – yet they refuse to apply the same rigor to the process of persuading new audiences as they do to producing and presenting classical concert music, theatre, dance, opera, fine art, etc.

Take a look at the promotional language used by just about any troubled orchestra that’s making news these days and you’ll find communications that bear the unmistakable hallmarks of having been created by amateurs. Those hallmarks – as I’ve stated so often on this blog – are self-flattery, self-indulgence, self-importance, condescension, presumption, cloying clichés, off-putting stereotypes, frivolous poetic metaphors, artifice, unrestrained hyperbole, mindless repetition and a cavalier, if not arrogant, disregard for the perspectives of persuadable but skeptical outsiders. Seldom will you find customer-centered messages that were crafted by knowledgeable communications strategists using objective, external market intelligence and rational methodologies. That sort of thing may be commonplace in professional marketing circles, but it’s just not how we do things in the arts.

I find it ironic that local cultural communities can rally around obscenely expensive and unnecessary building projects that saddle arts organizations with massive long-term overhead, but can’t scrounge up enough money to hire marketers with enough expertise to keep the doors open. And I’m amazed that the cultural sector as a whole continues to undervalue marketing as if it’s the shameful concession people thought it was back in the 1980s – or fundraising’s bastard stepchild, or a common sense endeavor that any passionate intern can learn, or the operational department that makes all those pretty posters and brochures.

Traditional sales-dependent arts organizations need a steady supply of new audiences to guarantee their survival. That’s a simple fact. The only way to get those audiences is to persuade new people to come, and the only way to do that is with new, more effective, more persuasive forms of strategic communication. We can’t fundraise new audiences (unless the funding community wants to pay their way). We can’t find new audiences through public policy. We can’t educate new audiences when it takes a generation to see returns. We can’t engage new audiences by constantly telling people how wonderful we are. We can’t get new audiences to come by doing what we’ve always done and hoping for better results (which appears to be the dominant strategic approach). We can’t compete for new audiences if we fail to match the sophistication of our commercial competitors. And we can’t attract new audiences by placing all of our faith in data and technology when the strategic impact of the content of our communication is what makes the primary difference.

Can the arts professionalize marketing? Sure. With the right industry leadership, the right expertise, the right allocation of resources and an influx of educated, experienced, properly compensated marketing professionals, it’s well within the realm of possibility. But can the arts make the changes that will be required to make it happen? That I’m not so sure about. Comprehensive change would have to originate with leaders who understand the issues, know where to find help and have enough influence to move the industry quickly and decisively away from counterproductive traditions and toward more productive business practices. Given the cultural sector’s preoccupation with fundraising and public policy, however, and the notable scarcity of qualified marketers on industry leadership rosters, such change is unlikely to occur any time soon.

Meanwhile we sit and watch as a long line of organizations creeps inevitably toward the brink, all the while preening and strutting and flirting and boasting as if it’s 1959 and the world is overflowing with avid arts lovers who find them irresistible. That’s not the case, of course, but it appears that somebody forgot to tell the people who approve all the emails, press releases, banners and brochures.

Professional marketers wouldn’t let their organizations talk endlessly – and almost exclusively – about how wonderful and important they were unless they had plenty of objective, external evidence to suggest that self-proclaimed wonderfulness and importance were compelling factors in new audiences’ decision-making processes. The likelier scenario is that they’d learn what new audiences actually believe is wonderful and important – in their realities and on their terms – and talk about that in equal measure.

The arts can be forgiven for having taken so long to accept marketing. Nobody wanted to believe back in the 1970s and 80s that art needed to be sold. But now that we know that attracting and keeping new audiences for many traditional arts organizations is the only thing standing between survival and obsolescence, shouldn’t we at least give professional marketing a try?

Bravo to Doug Borwick for his great post on marketing/research today. Doug and I don’t always see eye to eye on the the details of the engagement-marketing interface, but on this one we agree 100%. If you want to know what your audiences want, engage with them, talk to them, get to know them, listen to them and you’ll learn everything you need to know.

Expensive market research can be useful but there’s no substitute for having personal relationships with ordinary customers. As a veteran marketer I’ve done a lot of interesting and expensive research, but the most valuable information I’ve ever gained has come from simply engaging personally with audiences and hearing what they have to say. It’s the simplest thing to do and it doesn’t cost a cent, but it’s surprisingly uncommon in traditional arts institutions, as I’ve written about here and especially here.

The purpose of research is to understand audience dispositions and behaviors so we can be more responsive to their needs and desires. We can sit in our cubicles and conference rooms and hire expensive research firms to help us find out what the people who pass through our doors every day are thinking, or we can adopt a culture of engagement where every staff member from ED to intern is expected to connect meaningfully, personally, productively and regularly with the community members that our organizations were designed to serve.

The funding community seems to have recognized the chasm that’s opened up between traditional, remote, elite, tent pole organizations and their diminishing audiences. Led by the James Irvine Foundation, they’re trying to stimulate more engagement-oriented practices by adjusting the focus of their grants. I’m skeptical about the effectiveness of the approach, but I have no doubt that encouraging arts leaders and administrators to engage more fully with the world outside their artsy bubbles is the best way to help them solve their audience problems.

If you’re an administrator of an arts organization that has guests visiting today, try this: Stand by the doors for a while, introduce yourself to someone who looks like a newcomer, thank her for coming, ask her what made her decide to come today, listen long and hard to what she tells you and then and give her you card so she can email you tomorrow and share what her experience was like. If every staff member of every organization did this one small thing every day, the arts would be successful beyond measure.

Doug Borwick says it all the time and I’m happy to echo his recommendation: Engage!

Like many arts professionals, I’m watching the funding community’s pro-engagement push with great interest. I agree that community engagement is where we’re heading and that funders should be stimulating more engagement-oriented activity on the part of arts organizations, but I’m having trouble seeing how all those development departments will handle the added workload.

At first glance, it makes perfect sense that engagement will fall under the development umbrella. Development professionals are unusually adept at initiating, nurturing and sustaining relationships with community members so the fit is ideal: Engagement is merely an extension of the work that development departments already do. And since engagement doesn’t generate earned revenue, it makes sense that the people who will be seeking funding for engagement activities are the ones who execute those activities. The closer the relationship between the engagers and the funders who pay for their work, the more efficient their endeavors will be. But ultimately, engagement is about building networks of future donor/supporters so it makes sense to have the development staff out in the community creating the relationships that will generate long-term monetary returns. The development/engagement symbiosis is unmistakable and their pairing is as natural and appropriate as wine and cheese.

But at the same time, engagement takes a lot of work. Programming and promoting engagement activities takes time and resources, and sustaining meaningful relationships with community members requires huge personal investments on the part of the development staffers who will be asked to undertake the work. It will be interesting to see how development managers will keep the sustaining revenue flowing in while attempting to forge more meaningful, dynamic, person-to-person relationships between their organizations the the communities they exist to serve. Asking development to be the link between the community and the organization may be obvious, but will they be able to do it without adding more staff or having to raise a lot more money?

I’ve heard no discussions to date about how these new engagement endeavors will impact development departments, and frankly I’m surprised that more development directors haven’t spoken up about the increased burden (maybe they’re worried about offending their foundation contacts?). Development executives are under a lot of pressure these days and adding an entirely new layer of administrative responsibility seems like a lot to ask. It would be a shame if these new expectations pushed already stressed development pros to the limit and caused them to seek private sector gigs with more realistic job descriptions. The cultural sector can ill-afford to alienate professionals who are responsible for bringing so much revenue into their organizations.

I’m aware that the days of creaky old tent pole organizations that offer passive arts products are numbered, and that more nimble, hands-on, interactive arts organizations are where the foundation money will be going, but I believe that a lot of stable, mid-sized, traditional arts organizations still have a lot to offer and, with the right level of support, could find ways to remain viable, productive and valuable to their communities for many years to come.

So I’m curious to know how development departments in those organizations are preparing for their new engagement responsibilities and whether any fundraising pros out there are nervous about what’s coming down the pike. My perspective is that of a marketer and, while I can’t speak for all marketers, I’m confident that development professionals will have the support of their marketing colleagues. Our plates may be full with earned revenue-oriented work, but we’re happy to support you in your new engagement responsibilities whenever we can.

Here are a some adjectives taken from just a few pages of a current season brochure published by an American orchestra that made news recently for its fiscal difficulties.

Monumental, epic, extraordinary, awe-inspiring, perfect, breathtaking, ground-breaking, all-consuming, gorgeous, expansive, explosive, unmatched, sensational, powerful, striking, universal, sparkling, tantalizing, greatest, heroic, magical, electrifying, stunning, cathartic, spectacular, larger-than-life, dazzling, profound, once-in-a-lifetime, brightest, incredible, astonishing…

Here are a few adjectives that might reasonably describe failing, multi-million-dollar arts institutions that allow amateurs to craft the strategic communications on which they depend for survival.

Irresponsible, negligent, self-absorbed, insular, frivolous, suicidal, foolish, out-of-touch, boneheaded, unbusinesslike, presumptuous, oblivious, unrealistic, incompetent, blundering, obsolete, tragic, ephemeral, inconsequential…

Effective communications are not crafted by low-level staffers who’ve learned how to plug overblown adjectives into canned descriptive copy or by seasoned promotional writers who know how to crank out the language their bosses find most flattering. They’re crafted by skilled, well-educated, professional strategists who – armed with plenty of objective market intelligence – know how to leverage the needs and desires of target audiences in order to motivate behavior.

At some point the arts have to decide if preserving amateurish, egocentric customs is worth the price, or if it’s time to get serious about earning revenue and growing audiences with rational, professional, customer-centered business practices.

Astonishing indeed.

I read about another financially troubled symphony orchestra yesterday, this one in America’s heartland – in a world-famous music capital, no less – where folks are finding it difficult to pay for their shiny new concert hall.

When I hear about these orchestras I usually go to their websites and look at their season brochures for clues as to why they’re having so much trouble building audiences, and what I find there is depressingly familiar:

A multi-page brochure that was designed in the 1970s when Danny Newman wrote Subscribe Now! The details change of course, but the overarching message is relentlessly consistent. Here’s a tip for struggling orchestras: if you want to attract audiences that are under thirty-five years old, you might want to avoid using marketing messages that were developed before they were born.

A cover shot of a formally clad conductor waving a baton. This is often just one of several shots of the same conductor scattered throughout the brochure. In the rare instances where the conductor is a bona fide celebrity who has measurable drawing power with new audiences, this could be a good idea. But if he’s not, it’s a terrible idea. Note to conductors: If you’re using your organization’s sales materials to try to make yourself famous or further your career, or if you’re allowing your staff to flatter you by slapping you all over the brochure, you are a big part of the problem.

Pictures of everything but target audiences enjoying themselves at the events. Every professional marketer knows that one of the most effective ways to convince customers that their products are worth their time and money is to show those customers enjoying the product. If you’re a marketer at a financially ailing orchestra who publishes 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9 or 10 shots of your conductor in the same brochure (yes, it happens), cut the number down to 1 next time and use the extra space for pictures of the people you’d like to see in your venue enjoying themselves at your events. (Note: pictures of people clapping at your conductor don’t count.)

Bullshit. The copy in these brochures is dreadful. One of the great tragedies in classical music is that an industry on the brink of collapse continues to publish hackneyed, archaic, artificial, amateurish, self-indulgent poetry in its marketing materials in a vain attempt to appeal to shrinking audiences. If you’re an executive leader of a financially troubled arts institution that still uses silly phrases like “take a journey of the imagination” in your promotional materials, please read this.

Formal trappings of the concert experience. Music is an extremely difficult thing to photograph so most orchestras photograph the things that have traditionally gone along with classical music-making and assume they’ll resonate with the needs, wants and desires of new audiences. If you’re a marketing director of an ailing music organization whose new audiences want fun nights out with friends that include drinks, food and great live music, the shot of those serious tuxedo-clad musicians operating 18th century music making machines may not be your most persuasive pick.

Joshua Bell. Yes. Guest artists need to be promoted and, within the world of people who care about such things, notable artists continue to influence sales. But outside the world of people who care about such things – the place where new audiences come from – guest artists may be secondary considerations. If you’re a financially troubled institution and you’re wall-papering your brochure with every guest artist on the roster (yes, it happens), it might make more sense to focus on the marquee names and use the remaining space for explaining why one of your faithless churners might want come back for another concert – irrespective of who’s on the program.

Institutional baggage. The season brochure and its cousins are there to sell tickets. Unfortunately, the world of nonprofit arts blurs the line between messages that are meant to earn revenue and messages that are meant to further the institution’s mission-oriented objectives. The result is sales tools that talk about how excited the executive leader is about the upcoming season, the great work the education department is doing, which composers took their cues from folk traditions, who showed up at the gala, why the money we’re asking you to spend isn’t enough and how important the whole thing is to the continuity of Western civilization. If you’re a marketer at an institution that needs to sell tickets in order to survive, it could be a good idea to make sure your sales messages focus exclusively on persuading people to buy tickets.

I know I’ve said it all before and I apologize to regular readers who’ve already gotten the message, but I can’t help it. It’s painful to watch so much effort on the part of so many talented, passionate dedicated people go down the tubes when one of the industry’s core problems is so glaringly obvious and so easy to fix.

I once did marketing for an old vaudeville theatre-turned performing arts center that had amazing acoustics. One day I was walking past the telemarketing room where I overheard a young salesperson saying, “The acoustics in this theatre are so good that it’s like listening to a really well-produced CD with a great set of headphones.”

I thought of this yesterday when I read a story about tweeting during orchestral concerts in Pacific Standard Magazine (via Artsjournal.com). According to writer Tom Jacobs, a young Alabama journalist was recently asked to tweet from his seat at a symphony orchestra performance and afterward said, “The exercise helped transform me into more of an active listener, a true observer instead of merely an audience member.”

What’s fascinating about these comments is that they reveal a shift away from direct experience and toward mediated experiences. For the young telemarketer, the CD was the standard against which all other musical experiences might be compared. For the journalist, being a “true observer” wasn’t possible without a digital connection to an external social network. In both cases, having a direct, unmediated connection to the art was a lesser experience than one that could be had with the aid of technology.

As an arts marketer I tend to sell the experience of connecting directly with art because I believe it’s the transcendent ideal and that an unfiltered relationship is superior to any other means of arts participation. But I’m 53 years old. I was raised in a culture that believed in direct, immersive connections and my perspective is tied to my generation. Younger people who were raised in more highly mediated, less focused environments may not have the inclination or capacity for full immersion and may not be prepared to benefit the way my generation did from the experiences I’m often trying to sell.

In his article, Jacobs quotes researcher Clifford Nass who claims that young multi-taskers may not value the deep attention that direct experience requires. “That’s a cultural shift,” says Nass. “Artists have to think about what that means, and what they want to do about it.”

Personally, I think it means the days of sophisticated plays, operas, ballets and symphonic works that rely on measured temporal development are probably on their way out. The idea of sitting quietly, willingly, yieldingly and patiently in a theatre or concert hall giving oneself over to a complex communal artistic experience may be obsolete. Some people say that’s a good thing – that it was an artificial product of an overly fussy 19th century attitude about art that’s no longer useful. I can see their point, but I’m conflicted about having to toss out all the great works that were created to be experienced in such a context. It’s possible that this era of unmediated communal artistic immersion, rather than having been a forgettable anomaly, was one of the greatest achievements of human civilization.

Should we invite social media into theaters and concert halls and encourage young people to add our artistic products to their ongoing multi-tasking endeavors? Maybe the answer is both yes and no. If we’re presenting fare that doesn’t ask much of its audience and lends itself to being sampled in small bites, why not? You don’t have to pay much attention to Wicked or the Chinese Acrobats or John Williams’ movie scores to have a nice time at a show.

But asking someone to tweet through Stoppard’s Arcadia or a Mahler symphony or Martha Graham’s Appalachian Spring is just plain ludicrous. It doesn’t make sense to produce art that demands immersion for its payoff and then invite people to skim across the surface. They won’t be able to get from it what it was designed to deliver. And we risk having them find it obscure and off-putting and then sit there telling the world what a bad time they’re having while they’re having it.

The day may come when a new generation of great artists create brilliant new works for immersion-averse multi-taskers, but as long as we’re producing work that was designed for fully engaged, undivided audiences, we should do everything we can to get new people to come and stop apologizing for asking them to pay attention when they get there.

If the alternative is to produce art that doesn’t require a direct connection just to get more people to come to live events, why bother?