The great management theorist Edwards Deming once said:

“Every organization is perfectly designed to get the results it is producing.”

It’s a fascinating way of saying that if your organization isn’t getting the results it wants, the flaw is in the current design. The takeaway is that if your current design isn’t delivering the results you want, you have to fix the design.

It’s an idea that can be applied broadly to organizational systems, or narrowly to sub-systems within an organization, like marketing.

Is your marketing delivering the results you want?

If not, is there something about its design that needs to be changed?

I took a quick tour through several brand new season brochures for America’s top orchestras today and found publications that could easily have been produced thirty years ago. The content and design were historically consistent right down to the conductors on the cover, the shamelessly self-adulatory copy, the stuffy classical music clichés and the complete absence of anything having to do with customers and their experience with the product. The world has changed at lightening speed in the last three decades, yet orchestra administrators remain stubbornly committed to decades-old marketing strategies that produce increasingly unsatisfactory results.

Any business marketing expert will tell you that good marketing is about the customers and the way the product satisfies their needs and desires. American orchestras either haven’t heard this or they refuse to believe it (or they think they’re too far above their customers to come down to their level) because they continue to make their marketing all about themselves and how wonderful they think everyone should think they are. “We don’t design our persuasive appeals around your needs and desires; we tell you how much you should want us… and… and… and… well, you really should want us, because, well… because… Did we tell you how wonderful we are?”

You might find a couple of token nods to audiences in these brochures, but they’re usually shots of concert goers gazing adoringly at the stage (which is a clever way of pretending to make the content about the audience while actually making it about the product) or obligatory shots of young people at an education program. Out of the hundreds of photos I saw, none depicted classical music consumers enjoying themselves with one another at a show – even though socializing with friends & family tops the list of desires that lead people to attend arts events.

(Hint: If you know what motivates your customers to buy your product, you should make it the primary focus of your marketing content.)

(Hint: Read that last hint again. Click the link just above it. Then go get your latest season brochure and do an honest assessment of how much real estate is devoted to the product and how much focuses on the consumers and the extent to which their needs and desires will be satisfied by what you have to offer.)

(Hint: If you’re more than 90% about you, you probably forgot somewhere along the line that it’s not about you anymore.)

Arts audiences are in steady decline throughout the cultural sector and classical musical audiences are declining faster than the rest. Orchestra marketers who want to stop this attrition would do well to ask if their marketing materials, in being designed to focus exclusively on themselves, might be more effective if they were designed to focus on the audience in equal measure.