I rediscovered this old adage while scanning some marketing blogs today:

Never sell drills when what your customers are looking for is holes.

It’s a pithy way of saying that marketing should be about the customers and their needs, not about the product and its features. What drill buyers want is holes. The right drill for them is the drill that will give them the holes they need. So the right marketing for the drill manufacturer is the marketing that demonstrates how the drill will give the customers the holes they’re looking for. The most effective way to sell a drill to someone who needs holes is to focus on how satisfied the customer will be when he buys the drill that does the best job of giving him the holes he’s looking for.

In the arts, the holes can be many things:

• Ways to spend a quality night out with friends or loved ones
• Ways to experience enriching and edifying entertainment
• Ways to feel connected to a community or social stratum
• Ways to impress a date
• Ways to enjoy leisure time

As the drill adage points out, the role of arts marketing is to focus on these needs and how satisfied the customers will be when they’re met. Given the needs described above, the most effective arts marketing content would naturally focus on:

• People enjoying one another’s company in a given arts venue
• Customers describing how the art they’ve experienced improved their lives
• Depictions of people who represent a desirable community enjoying the art
• Couples bonding at an arts event
• People having a great time enjoying an arts event

And how often do arts marketers focus on customers having their needs met by the arts product?

Never.

We don’t do audience-centered marketing in the arts. It’s not part of our holier-than-thou culture. We do self-centered marketing that focuses exclusively on the superior features of the products we believe our audiences should want to buy. In other words, we sell drills, and rather than focusing on the holes, we promote the drills’ features relentlessly in a vain attempt to convince people that the drills we prefer to produce and promote are more important than the holes our audiences need to make.

Drills are a means to a hole. The arts are a means to various types of personal fulfillment. If the drill manufacturer should be marketing the hole, arts marketers should be marketing customer fulfillment, which means the content of our marketing should be about customers having a good time participating in the arts.

How many photos did your organization publish in marketing materials in the last twelve months? How many of them depicted customers having their desires fulfilled by attending one of your events?

If you’re like most arts organizations and your marketing content is exclusively self-centered, you’re spending way too much time talking about drills when you should be talking about how happy your customers will be with the holes that only you can help them make.