I read about another dying orchestra last week, so I went to their marketing materials to look for signs of trouble. There I found this blurb:

The purpose of sales copy is to persuade customers to buy tickets. And the best way to persuade customers to buy tickets is to answer the question, “Why would I want to go to that concert?”

This copy is just impotent drivel written by someone who knows nothing about strategic messaging and approved by an executive leader who, when it comes to vetting marketing materials, is incompetent. Sadly, it could have appeared in just about any orchestra’s season brochure.

Imagine yourself sitting in a busy Starbucks where the gal sitting next to you is a smart, 28-year-old tech executive who, as it turns out, played clarinet in her high school orchestra. You get to chatting and you decide to persuade her to come to your upcoming concert, so you lean in and say, “Written at the edge of the Baroque Era, the symphony uses a concerto grosso format to pull the curtain on the era as music transitions towards a new Classical aesthetic. At the opposite end of the spectrum, Prokofiev’s “Classical” Symphony, in imitation of Haydn, exemplifies Neo-Classical style in the 20th Century.”

Suddenly the Starbucks falls dead silent as everyone in the store freezes and stares dumbfounded in your direction. The gal you’re talking to looks nervously from you to the frozen onlookers then back to you where she’s trying to decide if this is a weird joke or she’s talking to a lunatic. She shrugs uncomfortably and, as the din begins to rise again, makes a quick excuse then runs out of the store while you, with yet another empty seat on your hands, sit there cursing the educational system for making her run away.

Now come on. Seriously. What would you say to her? How would you describe that concert to convince a real live human being that it was worth her time and money? You’d probably say something like this: “For this concert we paired up two symphonies that were written 170 years apart – but in the same style. The early one’s by Haydn and the more recent one by Prokofiev. Both pieces are gorgeous examples of their eras, so you get the entertainment value of listening to great live music, but the whole experience becomes more fascinating because of this extraordinary connection.”

Good sales copy is spoken language written down. Period. End of story. If you wouldn’t say it, for god’s sake, whatever you do, DON’T WRITE IT!

Classical music organizations that let inexperienced, inexpert, amateur marketing staffers fill their brochures with silly, pretentious, didactic nonsense can’t complain about not selling tickets – because they’re not actually selling tickets. And executive leaders who vet and approve this kind of non-strategic bullshit in their sales collateral have no one to blame but themselves for their organizations’ failures. 

If you want to sell tickets, you have to talk to real, live human beings in a language they understand about how your products will make them happy. If your organization can’t figure out how to do that, you’re probably too far out of touch with your community to be worth saving.