I never really understood the concept of branding until the day I learned that brands don’t actually exist. You can’t see, touch, taste, smell or hear a brand because brands have no tangible form and therefore can’t be apprehended through the senses.

A lot of the things we refer to as brands – logos, design schemes, corporate identities, tag lines, product names, service directives, customer experiences, etc. – aren’t brands, they’re tools we use to shape brands, and understanding the difference between brands and the tools we use to shape them is extremely important. In an industry with steadily diminishing audiences, any brand discussion that takes place in the absence of this understanding is likely to be a waste of valuable time and resources.

Marketing guru Seth Godin says that brands are bundles of consumer expectations. You can’t see bundles of consumer expectations because they have no tangible form. You can’t experience bundles of consumer expectations through any senses because they exist in the minds and hearts of consumers. Your brand is the bundle of consumer expectations that surrounds your organization or product. It’s how people who are aware of you think about you and whether they’re inclined to respond to the promises you make.

The place where arts professionals get in trouble when discussing brands is the difference between the abstract, external bundle – Brand with a capital B – and the various tools we use to shape that brand. Unfortunately, the word ‘brand’ has been used historically to refer not only to big picture Brands, but to a whole host of brand management tools so it’s no wonder that so many people are confused. For a while there, back in the middle of the last century, the words ‘brand’ and ‘logo’ were virtually interchangeable so it’s not uncommon to find older arts pros who can’t quite get past the brand/logo association.

But today the word refers to the collective disposition of the marketplace toward the organization or its products. And the reason it’s so important to understand the distinction between Brands and brand management tools is that good branding always begins outside the organization with an investigation into marketplace attitudes and expectations. The only way to know how to manage a brand is to measure it, and the only way to measure a brand is to research consumer expectations as they relate to the organization or the product in question.

Many arts professionals, however, because they don’t distinguish between Brands and brand management tools begin the process by examining their tools to consider whether they need to be repaired, redesigned or sharpened, or whether they’re the right tools for the job. The problem with this approach, of course, is that it makes no sense to sit around polishing your tools if you haven’t bothered to learn what they’re meant to do. The most gorgeous, exquisite, elegant logo in the world is meaningless if it wasn’t designed in response to consumer attitudes and expectations.

So why do we spend so much time and money futzing with our brand management tools when we should be focused on what’s happening in the minds of consumers? Three reasons come to mind:

1. Arts people love shiny objects. It’s much more satisfying to sit in a conference room talking about things you can see than it is to talk about abstract concepts that can only be described in terms of dry market data. Who wouldn’t rather watch the designer unveil her first round of logo ideas than pore over reams of research results? Both are necessary for serious brand conversations, but the research is far more important because it actually describes the Brand, while the logo design – which should come much later in the process – is just one of many brand management tools.

2. Agencies sell shiny objects. Agencies make a lot of money selling creative services so they tend to focus on the visuals that come with the branding process. Good full-service agencies will sell complete packages that include both research and brand development (better described as brand management tools development), but a lot of smaller agencies sell branding services that consist primarily of graphic design and marketing message enhancements. The most effective agency is one that will devote the bulk of its energies toward gathering and analyzing market intelligence and then helping the organization respond with practical tools that will shape and activate the Brand. All smart agencies know, however, that abstract ideas – no matter how potentially useful or productive – don’t sell agency services, and arts organizations will usually go with the agency that shows them the shiniest objects.

3. Arts organizations tend to be inner-focused. Unlike commercial marketers, we place far more faith in our products and in their inherent value than we do in our potential customers and their attitudes, tastes and expectations. We believe the arts transcend the marketplace so we tend to devote our promotional energies to extolling our products’ virtues rather than responding to market demands. In the arts, we often bypass the marketplace entirely and develop our brand management tools as reflections of our own attitudes and values, which is why arts brands tend to be so exclusive.

If the arts are serious about growing audiences, we’re going to have to shape brands that are broad, inclusive, enthusiastic and active. And to do that we’ll need brand management tools that respond to and stimulate new audience expectations. The key to doing this, as far as I’m concerned, lies in looking past the shiny objects, achieving consensus on what the word ‘brand’ means, and making sure that whatever definition we choose asks us to think first and foremost about the audience.

In my last post I offered some unvarnished advice for young arts marketing hopefuls that some folks found painful. Today I’d like to reframe that advice a bit and suggest three excellent reasons why arts administration students should think about marketing.

Only marketing can save the arts.

Survival for most traditional arts organizations will mean persuading enough new audiences to replace diminishing old audiences and marketing is the only way to do that. Now more than ever the industry needs well-trained, enthusiastic young administrators who can introduce smart, businesslike marketing practices, bold new sales initiatives and meaningful audience engagement strategies that will stop chronic audience attrition and build a healthy foundation for growth and sustainability. Marketing has long played second fiddle to fundraising, management and art, but today marketing is the way forward. If you’re looking for a path to executive leadership, feel free to choose the path that leads to the most prosperous future and leadership rewards will naturally follow.

The potential is astonishing.

If there’s something good to be said about marketing that hasn’t changed much in forty years, it’s that simple, sensible changes can bring about extraordinary results. New arts audiences abound, but they differ significantly from traditional audiences so they require different approaches. If you’re a young, aspiring arts administrator with fresh vision who understands what it will take to get your generation into theatres, concert halls and museums, now is the time to make it happen. Change won’t be easy – the cultural sector guards its traditions with fervent, sometimes suicidal, zeal – but introducing and managing change is a hell of a lot more exciting than repeating decades-old methods that no longer work. So take that entry-level marketing position, question EVERYTHING you learn, and if you can make a solid case for smart, sensible change, make it. Then do it. And if tradition-bound leaders stand in your way, take your innovative ideas where they’ll be valued and put to productive use.

Data will give you the edge. 

Your decision to embrace arts marketing comes at a time of monumental change in the way organizations think about finding and persuading audiences. For decades arts organizations made intuitive, creative, gut-level decisions using what Rick Lester has called the ‘HIPPO’ or ‘Highest Paid Person’s Opinion’ method where executive leaders had the final say no matter what their level of marketing experience or expertise. But as data rises in importance, numbers will make the final decisions and marketing will be driven by external intelligence rather than by internal guesswork. If you’re a young, tech-savvy marketer who can help your organization gather and interpret data, your leadership position begins the day you walk through the doors.

As for last week’s advice, I still stand by it – especially the part about stepping out of our offices and conference rooms to connect more meaningfully with ordinary arts participants – and that part about sales, which is the same thing only with more specific bottom line expectations. The idea of large, centralized institutions run by aloof insiders is a relatively recent phenomenon and somewhat of an aberration in the arc of Western cultural history. It reached its zenith in the middle of the last century and probably won’t come back again for a very long time.

Is arts marketing a good career choice? Who knows? I’ve always been a big fan of Joseph Campbell who advocated finding the thing that makes you blissful, doing it and trusting that success will follow. But I’m also a big fan of my dad who said when I went off to study theatre, “Make sure you have something to fall back on.” The good thing about marketing is that it’s a pretty useful skill wherever you go. And now that the arts are working to catch up with commercial marketers, it’ll be a more valuable skill than ever.

So, yes, be an arts marketer, but don’t be a follower. Many of your predecessors will happily lead you down the wrong path. My advice is to find the right path and make a point of leading anyone who’s prepared to come with you.

With graduation right around the corner, I thought I’d share some advice for senior arts administration majors who are thinking about starting out in marketing. I’ve met several young people in the past year who expressed an interest in arts marketing and who asked me if I thought it was a good direction. Here’s what I said:

1. If you’re planning to become an executive leader, don’t go into marketing. Arts leaders tend to emerge from art, management and fundraising, which are, and have always been, the legs that hold up the cultural sector stool. At about 35 or 40 years old, arts marketing is a relative newcomer that the cultural sector still regards as somewhat of an alien encroachment. This isn’t a growth industry and insiders rise further faster, so don’t waste time on an outside track.

2. If you’re serious about marketing, the arts are a terrible place to learn how to do it. Arts marketing is a quirky, idiosyncratic, quasi-professional hybrid that’s informed primarily by history, habit and the egocentric opinions of well-intentioned but inexpert executive leaders. Better to get a job in the commercial sector, learn real marketing, then return to the arts if you still want to later on. The professional expertise you bring with you will be invaluable.

3. If you do decide to forego marketing on your way to the top, try not to become a well-intentioned but inexpert arts leader. Marketing is an increasingly sophisticated professional discipline that requires hands-on experience, professional development and in-depth understanding of statistics and communication theory. Contrary to prevailing wisdom, becoming an arts leader won’t make you a marketing expert so you’ll need to learn as much as you can along the way.

4. Whatever direction you choose, make sure you master data and learn to let it tell you what to do. The era of marketing by expert opinion is over.

5. If current trends continue, centralized big money institutions that offer traditional, passive artistic experiences like classical concerts, ballet, theatre, opera and to some extent fine art will give way to smaller, more participative, community-centered organizations that encourage individual creative expression. As this happens, senior staff positions that pay decent salaries (like marketing directors or marketing VPs) will grow fewer and well-paying jobs will be reserved primarily for chief executives and fund raisers.

6. If you’re planning to reverse audience declines by changing the way big arts institutions do business, you might want to recalibrate your expectations. Large nonprofits and their executive leaders are change-averse by design. It’s built in. Stability, consistency and risk avoidance are fundamental aspects of traditional arts management because big, expensive art can only thrive in safe, predictable environments. Ironically, these qualities also make traditional organizations vulnerable to rapidly changing market forces so many of them will fail as a result of being inflexible. If you expect to influence change in the arts, don’t waste time trying to rescue the dinosaurs. Be the change you expect.

7. If you are not naturally inclined to interact personally, warmly, humbly, generously and sincerely with ordinary arts participants you might want to select another profession. The crumbling arts infrastructure we’re so desperately trying to prop up was created by aloof cultural elites, fourth wall-loving artists and behind-the-scenes administrators who erected massive institutional barriers to genuine audience engagement. Our job coming out of this mess will be to reconnect on a personal, human, democratic level with the people we’re here to serve.

8. If you’re tempted at any point along the way to believe that it’s about you, your organization or the art you make or sell, get up out of your chair, leave your office, exit the building, find some of those younger, more culturally diverse people you’ve been wanting to attract and ask them what they think it’s about. If there’s overlap between what you think it’s about and what they think it’s about, that’s what it’s about.

9. If you think sales is something icky that happens in the telemarketing room or when the intern listens to the messages on the group sales line, think again. Sales is today what marketing was back in the 1970s – the future of audience development.

10. If deep in your heart of hearts marketing is what you want to do, by all means do it.  Be really good at it and don’t let some jaded old-timer tell you it’s not worth doing. The arts need good marketers who are as passionate about marketing as they are about art. And the arts need leaders who, because they rose out of audience development, know how to make policy decisions that influence audience growth and earned revenue.

So if you’re graduating this spring, congratulations and welcome. There’s never been a more interesting or important time to get involved with growing arts audiences because the sales, marketing and engagement work we do today will determine, to a large extent, whether there will be arts jobs we can all do tomorrow.

In Part I we talked about the empty seat next to the last seat sold and how important it is to understand who isn’t sitting there.

In Part II we talked about the difference between super avid core audiences, less avid/quasi-regular patrons, and the uncommitted outer fringes of our communities of customers. Then we talked about the even less avid new audiences that lie just beyond that churning outer ring.

Today we’re going to talk about bridges that help us straddle the divide that separates our new audiences from current audiences.

But first a story.

I once was hired by an arts organization that, together with a major funder, came up with a plan to increase weekday participation among seniors by 25%. It was an easy objective to achieve, but the planners had laid out a tactical approach that made it impossible. “We want you to go out and talk to senior centers, retirement homes and senior living communities,” they said, as if these targets were juicy orbs of low-hanging fruit that no one had thought to pick.

I’d been down this road before so I knew there were many, more sophisticated sellers of weekday leisure activity (such as package tour operators) who had long ago claimed that territory, and that even the most talented, well-compensated, full-time salesperson would find it maddeningly complex, time-consuming and ultimately counterproductive. (Believe it or not, seniors aren’t sitting around waiting for some earnest young arts promoter to hand them something interesting to do.)

Meanwhile, I watched as commercial tour coaches rolled up to the venue every week depositing hundreds of seniors onto the organization’s doorstep. When I inquired about the relationships the organization maintained with these companies, I discovered that the gal who listened to the messages on the group sales line kept her contacts in an index card file* that wasn’t part of the organization’s patron database. All the tour business that came to this venue, as it turned out, was passive, and the untapped opportunities for growth in the package travel market were like juicy orbs of low-hanging fruit that nobody had thought to pick.

This story illustrates perfectly how the arts tend to dream about undiscovered imaginary audiences while blithely ignoring some of the more mundane but nonetheless real audiences that lie just beyond their comfort zones. The tour operators in this case were bridges that spanned the divide between the organization’s least important actual customers (those relegated to the index card file) and the even remoter audiences who booked their tours.

Here are a few similar bridges that we tend to ignore out of deference to our nearest and dearest – albeit diminishing – core audiences:

First Timers – Any customer who walks through the door for the first time represents an extraordinary opportunity to learn what motivated them to cross the old audience/new audience threshold. The more an organization can learn about what moves someone to cross that line, the easier it will be to motivate others to cross it as well, which in my mind places these venturesome pioneers at the center of our organizational priorities.

Resellers – There’s a whole world of businesses that will happily sell our tickets to their remote or proprietary audiences for a financial incentive. Commercial attractions like theme parks employ vast networks of third-party resellers while nonprofit arts organizations tend to eschew dealing with third parties who expect a cut of the take. At some point, though, we may need to reconsider the relative merits of netting 80% on a ticket sold to a new audience member by someone else vs. 0% on an empty seat.

Partners – I once partnered with a local theme restaurant that had a huge share of the student travel market. They wanted to offer dinner packages that included the Broadway show I was working on and I wanted to reach the student travel market. Together we moved about 8,000 packages. The scale in this case was large, but the model works on any level where two compatible entities share an interest in bringing people to the same destination.

Volume Buyers – If you’re still running one of those pathetic, low-level, one-size-fits-all “group” sales operations, it’s time to wake up and smell the 21st century. Individuals who buy in bulk on behalf of others are among the most important bridges any arts organization can have to new audiences. They include B-to-B buyers such as meeting and event planners, tour operators, charities, corporations, businesses, affinity group managers, resellers and destination partners, plus a broad range of diverse B-to-C buyers who purchase in bulk for a multitude of personal, avocational and professional reasons. If you’re keeping these folks in an index card box or some organizational equivalent, it’s time for a massive reorganization of priorities.

Sales Staff – Smart arts organizations are starting to hire executive sales staffers who oversee a broad range of inside and outside sales activities and who forge valuable, productive, bottom-line oriented community relationships. Sales has numerous benefits, but the principal idea here is that sales people, because they engage with the outside world, bring valuable insights back into organizations that have become too self-centered and insular.

Online Discounters – Daily deal and deep discount liquidators seem like a great ways to fill up the spaces that can’t be sold to real customers, but the attitude that allows us to think in terms of real customers and cheap infill is completely counterproductive. In reality, these companies are indispensable generators of the churn we need to solidify relationships with the future audiences – that is if we’re smart enough to manage the churn.

There are more, but I may have to save those for a follow-up post. The important thing is that these bridges all exist in the remote outer fringes of our artsy universe and they provide extremely useful opportunities to pull new audiences into the fold. If we’re serious about growing audiences, it’s time to respect the bridges we have, repair the bridges that we’ve been neglecting and build new bridges where new audiences tell us they’re looking for ways to cross the divide.

…

*Index card files were little boxes with 3″ x 5″ lined cards and tabbed dividers that people used in the olden days to store and organize data.

I’ve said many times on this blog that 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 communications.

Without further comment, I’ll let you to watch this.

(Via Judith Dobrzynski)

In my last post we talked about the last seat sold, the empty seat next to it, and how important it is to know what the person who didn’t show up and the one who did show up have in common. We in the arts talk a lot about new audiences, but we seldom take time to focus on exactly who these people are, what they’re looking for or why any of them might want to buy what we’re trying to sell.

And at the same time we complain bitterly about churn – the tendency among contemporary audiences to sample our wares without becoming regular or dependable customers. Having built our institutions on audiences of loyal, stable, committed patrons, we tend to view churn as a problem that needs to be overcome and we’re reluctant to accept the fact that churn and new audiences are essentially the same thing.

I used this diagram in my book to describe the place where churn and new audiences meet. The inner circle is the arts organization, of course, and everyone professionally associated with it. The first ring is the core support system of members, donors, subscribers and loyal patrons. The second ring is the somewhat less avid, but nonetheless vital population of regular patrons. And the third is the fickle, least avid, least committed audience of frustrating churners. So far, it’s a picture of the audience segments I described in my last post.

But the ring I’m most interested in is the outermost ring – the thin, light gray ring just beyond the third that identifies the relationship between old and new audiences. The folks who occupy this adjacent space are more likely than others to give us a try, but for one reason or another they haven’t yet stepped across the boundary to become part of the active third ring. Nothing, as far as I’m concerned, is more important than understanding how to motivate people to cross that line.

I chose to illustrate new audiences this way for four reasons:

1. It is imperative that we begin thinking about audiences in terms of relative avidity – the farther you move from the center, the less avid the audience’s interest in the product. New audiences who inhabit the fourth ring are even less avid than our third ring churners, but compared to the rest of humanity, they’re still more likely to participate. That places them in a very specific position relative to our existing communities of customers.

2. The closeness of new audiences tells us exactly where to look for them. A lot of arts professionals dream of ideal but as yet untapped new audiences that look and act just like our super-avid base – but who exist in some mysterious realm that we haven’t yet figured out how to contact. Realistic marketers, meanwhile, know that new audiences lie just beyond the ragged, chaotic fringes of our universe of tepid dabblers.

3. Everything we need to know about motivating the fourth ring, we can learn from the third ring. Those who occupy the churn zone have the most in common with those who lie just beyond its boundaries so the more we know about churners and the more actively we use that knowledge to persuade new audiences, the more newcomers we’re likely to pull into the fold.

4. Our job as arts professionals is to persuade everyone within our four-ring universe to move toward the center. If we direct our persuasive energies to the outermost ring, it will naturally influence the inner three rings and draw everyone within our sphere of influence closer. But if we apply our persuasive energies only to the first two rings, which is what we do now, the third and fourth rings will remain uncommitted and elusive.

The lesson in all of this is that we have to love the churn. We have to create as much of it as we can, we have to learn everything it can teach us, we have to use what we learn to forge stronger bonds with uncommitted churners, and we have to apply what we learn to unpersuaded outsiders so we can lure more of them into the zone.

Or to put it in community engagement terms, we have to know and love the folks in – and just beyond – the churn zone as well as we know and love the folks in the super-avid base. Then we have to relate to them in a manner that’s as personal, relevant and meaningful as the way we’ve been relating to avid arts lovers for the last fifty years.

I know it’s counterintuitive. No serious arts professional wants to believe that our future is dependent on investing in people who don’t currently care all that much about what we do, but it is. Our job now is to convince them we’re worth caring about – and then give them a damned good reason to continue caring once they’ve passed thorough our doors.

It’s 7:59 PM at a one-hundred-seat venue and a show is about to begin.

Seventy-five seats have been sold since the on-sale date. The first tickets were sold to buyers who were eagerly waiting for the event to happen. As time went on more tickets were sold, but the relative enthusiasm of the buyers tended to wane as the sales campaign unfolded. Finally, in the days and hours before the event, a few stragglers tipped into the ticket-buying category and shortly before curtain time, the seventy-fifth buyer walked up to the box office.

Who’s the most important customer?

Tradition would suggest that the first thirty or forty buyers — the subscribers, members and loyal patrons who responded first — are the most important. They’re on the most responsive lists, they come to a lot of events, they have the closest relationships with the organization, they’re more likely to give money, they have more in common socially with the people who run the organization and their motivations are well understood by the managers and marketers who craft the sales messages. Who wouldn’t value them? We love them! Customer number one is customer number one for a reason and the rest follow according to their relative avidity.

Buyers forty-one through sixty-five are a little tougher. They’re more expensive to reach, they’re less committed, they’re less passionate about the art form and they may not show up again until next year. They’re vitally important to the bottom line but they’re an unpleasant necessity. Life would be so much easier if we didn’t have to worry about the vagaries and expense of single-ticket-buying audiences.

And sixty-six to seventy-five? Who the hell knows? They’re late, they’re fickle, they’re unreliable, they’re hard to find, they respond mostly to incentives or discount offers and they have a take-it-or-leave-it attitude that’s almost insulting. They may help us with our goals, but they’re a pain in the ass and they’re not really our people anyway. And besides, we may never see them again.

So who’s most important to you?

I loaded these last few paragraphs with a bias that reflects some deep-seated attitudes in our industry. We tend to know and care the most about the people who know and care the most about us; and conversely, we know and care the least about the people who know and care the least about us. It’s human nature. And it makes sense that such an attitude would shape our priorities. After all, why invest too much time in audiences that don’t share our passions and preferences? Why bother with people who don’t even have the decency to behave like proper arts patrons?

But if I were to pick the most important customers in this example it would be a tossup between numbers seventy-five and seventy-six — the last one to purchase a seat and the one who came closest to filling the next seat but for some reason didn’t make it. The rest are important — there’s no doubt about that — but they represent the past and the present; we already know how to talk to them. Seventy-five and seventy-six, on the other hand, define the difference between old and new audiences and they have more to teach us than anyone who’s ever walked though our doors.

Personally, I’m curious to know what made seventy-five get off the couch and drive down to the venue. He almost didn’t make it. I can’t help wondering what moved him to get here in time. We have twenty-five empty seats and if we can learn what motivated this guy, we should be able to use that information to persuade more people like him to come to our events. I wonder if there’s something we should know about him that would make it easier for us to persuade him to buy earlier or come more often.

And my heart goes out to number seventy-six who thought she might come but wound up somewhere else. Where is she tonight? What did she decide to do instead? Why didn’t she come to our venue to see our show? What was it about what we said to number seventy-five that got him in the door but failed to capture seventy-six? Could we have said something different that was slightly more compelling — something that would have tipped her into the ticket-buying category, too? What should we know about her that would make our messages more persuasive?

No matter what size the venue or how popular the show, the unsold seat next to the last seat sold has somebody’s name on it. And the only way to fill that seat is to make whoever isn’t sitting there a priority.

We can talk endlessly about new audiences while continuing to put all of our energy into making customer number one happy. But as far as I’m concerned, the key to new audiences lies in making the customers who can’t decide where to go as important as the ones who wouldn’t dream of being anywhere else.

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 professional marketing 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 cultural institution 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. This 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. This is 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? This 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. This is 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 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 your 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!