Arts pros love to talk about the various reasons audiences are disappearing, but few are willing to discuss the industry’s less than professional approach to marketing. Here are a few widely held misconceptions that I think should be part of the discussion.

Myth 1. Marketing is Common Sense

Reality: Marketing is a profession. Its practitioners benefit from in-depth academic study, insight into communication theory, practical business experience, knowledge of current trends and innovations, ongoing professional development and, as with all professions, plenty of accumulated expertise. Marketing is no more common sense than finance, law, engineering or playing the violin.

Myth 2. Executive Leadership Confers Marketing Expertise

Reality: The belief that marketing is common sense allows many arts leaders to think they possess marketing expertise by virtue of their rank. But arts leaders seldom arrive at their positions with enough knowledge or legitimate professional experience to claim such acumen. Most are under-prepared amateurs who, fit or not, make high-stakes decisions that impact the health and sustainability of their organizations.

Myth 3. Arts Marketing is Like Business Marketing

Reality: Arts marketing is unique, unusual and unlike business marketing in many significant respects. While business marketing tends to be current, customer-centered, rational and bottom line-driven, arts marketing is tradition-bound, self-centered, subjective and driven by multiple, overlapping and often contradictory institutional goals and objectives.

Myth 4. The Arts Do A Fairly Good Job of Marketing

Reality: The arts have been losing audiences steadily for the last three decades and all the while relying on the same loopy, hackneyed, repetitive, self-indulgent – and sometimes just plain idiotic – communications content: “Celebrate Live Performance!” “Take a Journey of the Imagination” “If Music be the Food of Love…” “Experience the Magic” “It’s a Zany, Madcap Romp!” etc., etc., etc.

Myth 5. Technology is the Answer

Reality: Content is the answer. Always has been. Technology is a tool for delivering content so it’s more akin to your mail carrier than anything else. If you don’t expect your mail carrier to sell tickets, you shouldn’t expect technology to do it either.

Myth 6. Marketing is a Creative Enterprise

Reality: Marketing has a lot more to do with math and science than it does with creativity. Creativity is to marketing what paint color is to building a house. It’s an important and necessary part of the process, but it’s of no use whatsoever while the architects, engineers and builders are drawing up the plans.

Myth 7. We’re Selling Tutus, Tuxes and Tights

Reality: A casual observer could be forgiven for believing this is true, but the arts are actually selling customer experiences, which means – though you’d never know it by looking at our marketing – that it’s all about the customer. The frivolous, clichéd, self-flattering trappings we use to decorate our marketing content are old-fashioned insider shorthand that curious outsiders often find obscure and off-putting.

Myth 8. Brainstorming is the Same as Strategy

Reality: Putting a group of artsy insiders in a conference room and having them dream up creative ways to tell the world about upcoming events is the worst possible approach to developing strategic sales content – yet it’s the way we do marketing in the arts. A more professional approach would be to identify targets, gather objective market intelligence about their needs, wants and desires, then construct rational persuasive appeals that describe how the products will satisfy their yearnings.

Myth 9. Self-Congratulatory Bombast is a Good Way to Sell Tickets

Reality: This may have been true back in the olden days when there were a lot of people who thought we were as wonderful as we think we are, but it doesn’t appear to be true today. New audiences need to be told explicitly why our wonderfulness is of value to them or, in other words, how our products will satisfy their yearnings.

Myth 10. Audiences Need the Arts

Reality: While it may be true on a collective, philosophical level, it’s not true on a pragmatic, individual level. No single person needs any particular arts organization so if an organization’s “you need us” attitude creeps into its communications content, no matter how coy or clever the packaging may be, the message ends up being false, presumptuous, and condescending.

UPDATE: Followup post – “Ten More Marketing Myths That Arts Leaders Still Believe”

I saw a subscription brochure for a major American orchestra recently that was just plastered with pictures of people in formal attire. And I do mean plastered. I started counting individuals in tuxes and gowns and lost track at around the 350 mark. There were several shots of the orchestra, which accounted for quite a few, then there were chorus shots, which nearly doubled the number, then there was a shot of the full orchestra and chorus together, which must have been at least 200 more, plus various shots of guest artists, society types at the gala, and no fewer than ten close-ups of the conductor – all in black formal wear!

In economics, the law of diminishing returns suggests that adding too much of a useful thing to a given process will at some point reduce the desired output. If a farmer uses the right amount of fertilizer, for example, the crop yield is high, but if he keeps adding fertilizer he’ll reach a point where the nutrients go out of balance and the yield begins to diminish.

I’m fairly certain there’s a point of diminishing returns in arts marketing. It’s the point where the comfortable old clichés we’ve been using for the last six or seven decades – things like tuxedos, for example – start doing more harm than good. The nutrient mix of a fertile marketing message, if you will, requires balance to produce the best results. Old audiences may welcome images of tuxes because they evoke positive memories of previous concert experiences. But new audiences may find them off-putting because they convey a formality or stuffiness that diminishes the appeal of going out with friends to enjoy some live music.

If you want to know how many tuxes you should use for best results, start by knowing for certain how appealing they are to old audiences and how unappealing they are to new audiences, then decide how important these targets are to your organization. If your research shows that tuxes are a turnoff to new audiences and new audiences are extremely important to you because without them you’ll eventually go out of business, you might want to use fewer images of tuxedos.

Given how many tuxes there were in the brochure above, It seems evident that either this organization’s research revealed an unusually positive response to formal wear among new audiences, or the organization had no interest whatsoever in appealing to uninitiated outsiders. My guess is that neither is true and they did what most arts organizations do: They talked a lot about how important younger, more culturally diverse audiences were, but didn’t actually do any research into what motivates them – or offends them, as the case may be – and then simply gave their graphic designer the photos they had, which were of people in tuxes and gowns, and encouraged said designer to use whatever pictures she thought would make the executive director happy.

I mentioned in passing some months ago that if a picture is worth a thousand words, it might be a good idea to write a thousand-word essay about how your product satisfies the needs, wants and desires of younger, more culturally diverse audiences and then choose a photograph that best illustrates the process. If you were to actually research and write such an essay, chances are you’d be using shots of young, diverse-looking people laughing and enjoying drinks together in your lobby bar – and there wouldn’t be a tuxedo in sight.

I’m being a bit simplistic here to demonstrate a point. Tuxedos are a quantifiable cliché that classical music executives can begin to count and ratchet downward in hopes of restoring balance to their persuasive endeavors. But the broader point is that all arts marketing messages have to be properly balanced and that different people tend to respond to pictures of tutus, swooning sopranos, marble busts and mugging Shakespearean clowns in different ways. If we want to motivate new audiences, we have to know in advance how they’ll respond to our most beloved – but potentially offensive – iconography and then produce marketing messages that attract rather than repel them.

I once worked for a performing arts organization that sent out a steady stream of repetitive, self-centered, shamelessly boastful marketing messages that, for all their bravado, were about as interesting as old wallpaper. One day in a marking meeting I said, “I wonder if it might be useful to step back and think about the audiences we’re targeting to see if what we’re saying resonates with them. I mean, who are we talking to?” And the marketing director said with withering condescension, “Trevor, dear, we’re talking to everyone.”

I hope it goes without saying that talking to everyone is the same as talking to no one, but I’ll say it anyway: Talking to everyone is the same as talking to no one. The essence of marketing is appealing to the needs, wants and desires of a particular audience, so if you’re talking to everyone, you either have to appeal to every need, want and desire in all of humanity or you have to put your information out there and hope that it hits enough people who’s needs, wants and desires fit with what you’re selling. The latter, of course, pretty much sums up what arts marketing has been about for the last half century.

If you can’t describe exactly who you’re talking to when you craft your marketing messages, you can be absolutely certain that those messages are NOT strategically persuasive. They may be informative and they may even be enticing, but persuasion means knowing what your audience wants and then demonstrating how your product will satisfy their yearnings. If you can’t describe who you’re talking to, you can’t possibly know what they want. And if you don’t know what they want, you can’t describe how your product will make them happy, which is what satisfying yearnings is all about.

“Oh, but Trevor, we know who we’re talking to. We’re talking to arts lovers and we’re telling them about things they’ll really be interested in.”

Yeah, well, that’s really quite charming but this is 2012 and the likelihood of there being enough self-motivated arts lovers within your sphere of influence is getting slimmer every day. Arts marketing messages can’t just appeal to the pre-motivated. They have to motivate, which means they have to be strategically persuasive, which means they have to promise to satisfy the needs, wants and desires of the people you’re talking to – especially if you’re hoping to attract new audiences. If you’re talking to some abstract population of generic arts lovers and there aren’t enough of them in the marketplace to meet your sales goals, you’re not going to sell enough to stay in business. Period.

So here’s a tip for replacing those generic target audiences with actual people so you can start motivating more of the behavior you want. Divide your current audience into archetypes. Group them into categories like, perhaps, empty nesters, the founding generation, busy moms, gay professionals, etc. (Don’t just make it up, examine your data and your actual audiences carefully.) Then, do the same thing for new audiences. Decide who you want to see in those empty seats or galleries and craft archetypes for them as well.

Next, describe those archetypes in terms of their demographic characteristics, levels of interest in your product and lifestyle choices. Using the market intelligence you’ve gathered, craft profiles that describe your submarkets in detail, taking care to include information on what they want and how your product can satisfy their yearnings. Be honest, be as objective as you can and never make assumptions that aren’t supported by data.

Phil and Honey

Then – and this is the really important part – create and name characters that personify your archetypal profiles. Give them lives and personalities and make them as real and vivid as you possibly can. Find or take photos that bring those characters to life, blow them up and place them on your conference room walls. Work with your administrative colleagues to create a family of audience prototypes, make them part of your daily administrative conversations and get used to referencing them, by name, whenever you discuss marketing strategies.

Here’s a promise: If those photos and profiles are on the walls in your conference room the next time you sit down to develop marketing messages, your messages will be far, far more effective. Knowing exactly who you’re talking to will force you to speak to them rather than at them, it will force you to address their needs, wants and desires, and it will help you steer clear of the lopsided, narcissistic self-flattery that so often passes for strategic messaging in the arts.

Next time, try talking to individuals rather than to your database and I guarantee you’ll have a much more interesting conversation.

I was speaking to a group of arts pros recently about the importance of knowing what motivates marginal audiences (a.k.a. new audiences) and someone asked me how we might go about learning that. It was a good question, but the fact that it had to be asked speaks volumes about how arts administrators relate – or fail to relate – to the people who keep them in business.

The answer, of course, is to talk to them. If we want to know what motivates people to come to our events, the easiest thing to do is to stand in the lobby, introduce ourselves to arriving guests – especially the ones who look least at home – and ask them what motivated them to come.

The people we most need to know – those who occupy the outer fringes of our audiences – come in and out of our venues every day. Getting to know them and learning why they come is a simple matter of saying hi and striking up a conversation. And the more we know about them, of course, the more we’ll know about what it takes to get others like them to come too.

The sad thing about this is what’s likely to happen if an arts organization tries it. The idea will be proposed by the marketing staff, the program will be approved by senior management, forms will be drafted and a team of clipboard wielding interns will be dispatched to the lobby to accost guests and check off little boxes. In typical arts management style, the people who most need to engage directly, sincerely and humbly with new audiences – the senior decision makers – will assign their lowliest staffers to mix with the common rabble who pass through the venue doors.

If you’ve ever wondered why arts marketing materials are such repetitive, ineffective, self-congratulatory crap, the answer lies in the fact that we don’t know the people we’re talking to when we create them. It’s impossible to develop strategic messages when we haven’t bothered to learn what motivates the individuals we’re trying to persuade. The essence of persuasion is describing how our products satisfy the needs, wants and desires of our target audiences, but if we don’t have a direct, intimate, personal understanding of those yearnings, we’ll never be able to appeal to them.

I once oversaw marketing for a multi-year run of The Lion King in Los Angeles. About a year into the run demand started to wane so I started hanging around the lobby introducing myself to newcomers and asking what prompted them to buy tickets. Over time I met hundreds of people who handed me a wealth of information about the motives of fence-sitting audiences – information that directly influenced the creation of effective new marketing messages. It was astonishingly easy to do and it didn’t cost a cent.

So when people ask me how to learn what motivates new audiences, here’s what I recommend: Make certain that everyone who has input into the marketing process spends time getting to know new audiences. Insist that executive leadership, artistic leadership and the marketing staff all sign up for regular shifts in the lobby where they’ll converse with real, live first-time ticket buyers.

Make it about establishing rapport and developing sincere personal connections, but make it also about learning what motivated each person to act: “Jennifer, I’m curious to know what made you and your friends come down to the arts center tonight. Was there something in particular that prompted you to place the order?” After the conversations, and well out of sight of the patrons, record what you learned and begin aggregating the data.

For an industry that talks so much about engagement, we have a surprising reluctance to initiate meaningful contact where it matters most – between arts leaders and the new audiences that will decide how long they can keep their jobs. The fatal flaw in arts marketing is the chasm we’ve allowed to develop between the people who decide what to say and the people who should be telling us what needs to be said.

Since survival may depend on closing that gap, why not grab your ED and wander down to the lobby tonight to say hello to tomorrow’s audience?

I was chatting about audience development recently with a fellow who manages a prominent performing arts institution and the discussion turned quickly toward the subject of churn. He was having problems with uncommitted single ticket buyers who returned infrequently or never at all and it was driving him crazy.

The more he talked about his churn problem, the more disdainfully he spoke about his unreliable, marginal, inconstant customers and the more obvious it became that he resented them deeply for the damage they were doing.

Later in the same conversation we talked about new audiences and he began to speak eloquently and surprisingly optimistically about untapped markets of loyal ticket buyers that he was certain lay just beyond his grasp. He was convinced that there were new audiences out there that weren’t being properly courted and that, if they could be found, would be the answer to his audience development problems. I could tell by the way he spoke that he was tremendously fond of these people, imaginary though they were.

What fascinates me about this, and other conversations I’ve had just like it, is the disparity in affection we maintain for the audiences we have and the audiences we wish we had. I admire the optimism that allows some to envision an enthusiastic, loyal, well-behaved audience that has yet to be properly persuaded, but I worry that belief in such an ideal may be preventing us from facing an unwelcome truth, which is that the new audiences we’re looking for are going to be found among, or near, our least favorite customers.

You know those folks who bought half-price tickets through that online discounter? Or the people who got vouchers through their HR office? Or the kids who used Grandma’s subscription seats that one time when she was in Florida? Or the couple who came with that other couple who bought some extra singles at the last minute? Or the folks who were at the hotel down the street and popped in for lack of anything better to do? Or the business guy who came because his client was an arts fan? Or that gaggle of young people who decided to try something different but left at intermission? Or the out-of-place-looking young couple in the cheap gown and hand-me-down jacket? Or the folks who came once because a starchitect designed the new venue? Or the people who were more interested in drinks and dinner than they were in the show? Or the people who came to the one event that featured people like them but then never came back? Or the folks who came on the bus with the person who placed the order with the intern who returns the messages on the group sales line? You, know; those people?

Uh huh.

We can dream all we want about external, ideal, as-yet-undiscovered audiences that are comprised of younger, more culturally diverse people who behave just like the audiences we have now, but those audiences don’t exist. The audiences that do exist are the ones that are coming now – and others very much like them who are not as well motivated but who are nonetheless more likely than the rest of the world to give us a try. These are our marginal and adjacent audiences – our new audiences – and they’re our future.

A few months after our conversation, my churn-weary friend’s organization sent me a subscription brochure that was every bit as old-fashioned, cliché-ridden and insider-oriented as the stuff that arts organizations started sending out when Danny Newman wrote Subscribe Now! thirty five years ago. He wanted the churn to stop, but he couldn’t bring himself to face, let alone speak to, the dreaded churners on whom his survival depended.

“Displacement” is a word that Freudian psychologists use to describe what happens when people substitute an imaginary ideal for an unacceptable reality. It’s a defense mechanism that helps otherwise healthy people cope with difficult situations. Unfortunately for some, displacement can become a debilitating delusion that prevents them from recognizing and dealing with the world as it is.

Crazy, huh?

Poetry is not marketing.

Poets use language to evoke images, ideas and feelings in reader’s minds. The goal is usually some sort of transcendent synthesis that creates a connection between the writer, the reader and whatever broader realm the poet wants his readers to inhabit.

Marketers use language to describe how their products will satisfy their customers’ desires. The goal is to motivate customers to buy the product.  Big difference.

The brilliant marketer Scott Boilen didn’t use poetry to sell the Snuggie.  He showed people sitting on their couches eating popcorn and flipping channels without having to unwrap their blankets because that’s exactly what his customers wanted.

I got an email from an arts organization the other day that wanted me to “take a journey around the world” by subscribing to a concert series featuring composers from different countries. It was an attempt to use a poetic metaphor – in this case travel – to sell me tickets, but as I just mentioned, poetry isn’t marketing so it didn’t work.

It didn’t work because: 1. The poetry sucked. Any good writing teacher will tell you to steer clear of overwrought clichés – and travel metaphors in the arts are about as hackneyed as you can get.  2. It didn’t describe the product in terms that reflected my desires. I wouldn’t want to go to a concert hall to travel around the world even if the idea were fresh and original.  3. When it comes right down to it, it’s not a trip around the world, it’s a classical concert series fercrissakes. If I want a vacation, I’ll call my travel agent.

Traditional sales-dependent art forms are in big trouble, but for some reason we still allow ourselves to publish vapid, self-indulgent amateur poetry in our marketing materials when we should be speaking a direct, persuasive, customer-oriented language that motivates new audiences. The only reason anyone should ever use a travel metaphor in a promotional message is if their research revealed a hunger for metaphorical travel among the audiences they were targeting:

“Our focus group participants expressed a strong desire to engage in imaginary travel to foreign countries by listening to music from time to time that was written by international composers.”

Sounds silly, doesn’t it?  Of course it does.  It’s absurd.  The likelihood of those younger, more culturally diverse audiences we’ve been whining about expressing such desires is ludicrous. Try slipping some of your own fanciful promotional poetry into that sentence and see if it fits.

“Our focus group participants expressed a strong desire to celebrate live theatre.”

Or better yet, do some research to find out what your fence-sitting audiences actually do want, then sell them your product by telling them in direct and un-ornamented words and images exactly how it will fulfill their desires.  It is impossible to write inane promotional poetry when you’re talking to real people in real language about the things they told you they really care about.

I know some of you are arguing with your computer screens right now, “But, but, but we’re the arts! We’re not selling Snuggies, we’re selling transcendent experiences. Our marketing would be dull and lifeless if all we did was satisfy the mundane desires of couch potatoes.” And you may be right; poetic metaphors may be necessary to fully express what’s so special about the products we sell. But it’s not up to us to assume what new audiences want, or tell them what they should want or, god forbid, try to awaken wants they didn’t even know they had. That’s a job for poets who aren’t looking for a cash return on their investment. The rest of us have to start where Scott Boilen starts – on that couch in front of that TV – and learn what’s going to motivate people to get off their lazy, polyester-wrapped asses and come to our events.

Poetic metaphors may help to make our language more expressive, but when it comes to travel, the only journey we should care about is the one that begins on that couch and ends at our venue doors.

Next up: “…set against the backdrop…”