Been thinking a lot about the arts and politics lately and couldn’t help noticing some striking resemblances between the cultural community and the Republican party:

Losses

Both the Republicans and the arts are losing their audiences. It’s a well-established fact in the arts, and an emerging trend in politics where the Republicans’ older, homogeneous, conservative base is shrinking while the Democrats’ youthful, multi-cultural coalition is growing.

Conservative Wings

Both the arts and the Republicans have influential factions of long-time donors/supporters who resist change and who use their influence to maintain the status quo – even when it means alienating potential new audiences.

Out of Touch Leadership

Both are run by leaders who have severely limited personal connections to tomorrow’s audiences/voters.

Exclusionary Platforms

Both promote ideologies that divide the world – either explicitly or implicitly – into the welcome and the unwelcome.

Overemphasis on Fundraising

The Republicans’ fixation on opening doors to unlimited giving resulted in the most expensive campaign in history, yet no amount of money could compensate for their inability to appeal to a large enough audience.

Old White People

Since 8 PM on election night pundits have been discussing the erosion of “demographic” support for the traditional Republican party. While Democrats appealed to a broad, diverse coalition that looked like America (check out the audience for Obama’s victory speech), Republicans hammered the base in hopes of squeezing more die-hard supporters out of its shrinking demo.

The irony, of course, is that the arts are populated mostly by progressives who lean toward Democratic values, but when it comes to making our case to the world about our worth, relevance and ability to lead, we’re Republicans through and through.

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UPDATE on Dec. 5:  I wrote this glib little post a few days after the election. It was a throw-away meant to fill space between more thoughtful essays, but it went viral and has become by far the most widely read post on this blog. Normally I write about strategic communications failures in the arts: How our amateur approach to marketing is contributing to declining audiences, and what we can do to turn things around.

Feel free to visit my home page and browse from there. And if you like what you read, try my book – a brief, fun, irreverent take on the sorry state of arts marketing, and a serious set of recommendations for increasing earned revenue.

Thanks for visiting.

Last week, Eli Broad tweeted this:

“What do customers want and need? That’s the key to marketing.”

It’s brilliant, of course. The essence of marketing is knowing what customers want and what they need, and then using that information to describe how your products will make them happy.

It’s not news, though. Aristotle said it some 2500 years ago and smart politicians, religious leaders and salesmen have been heeding it and repeating it ever since.

The irony in Mr. Broad’s tweet is that he has unwittingly revealed the arts industry’s Achilles heel: We’re utterly dependent on new audiences for survival, but we don’t have a clue what they want or need and we’re incapable of describing how our products will make them happy. The reason the arts are losing audiences – and that so many traditional arts institutions are destined to fail – is that we don’t do the kind of marketing Mr. Broad recommends.

Last week I published a post that asked this question:

If audiences for traditional art forms are in steady decline, and the only hope for survival is attracting a dependable supply of new paying audiences, why doesn’t the funding community insist that arts institutions do more professional marketing?

The answer I got off the record was that marketing is so far removed from the funding community’s culture that looking to them for guidance, let alone leadership, was ridiculous.

But then I got Eli’s tweet and it occurred to me that there really are smart marketing experts in the funding community who are capable of leading the way and using their influence to ensure that the organizations they support actually do marketing in a professional manner.

The thing I can’t quite understand, though, is why they don’t do it.

If audiences for traditional art forms are in steady decline, and the only hope for survival is attracting a dependable supply of new paying audiences, why doesn’t the funding community insist that arts institutions do more professional marketing?

I know that’s a loaded question, but I can’t think of any other external entity that has the perspective, resources and influence – not to mention vested interest – to pull the arts industry out of its tailspin and start growing the audiences on which its future depends.

I’ve been writing for two years now about the sorry state of marketing in the cultural sector, a concise summary of which can be found here and here, and the upshot is this: the arts are a diminishing industry with a desperate need for new audiences, but executive leadership is comprised mostly of marketing amateurs who don’t have the education, perspective, business experience or professional expertise to solve the problem.

The most glaring evidence of this professional deficiency is a half century of banal, repetitive, hackneyed, presumptuous, conspicuously self-congratulatory and increasingly ineffective marketing messages that are out of touch with the desires and expectations of tomorrow’s audiences. Professional marketers change their content to reflect changes in the marketplace, but arts organizations, despite chronic, long-term audience attrition, continue to speak a language that lost its potency decades ago.

I’m convinced that the arts industry needs a comprehensive overhaul of its strategic messaging – something akin to what the Republican Party did during George Bush Jr’s first campaign. Inspired by the brilliant communications strategist Frank Luntz and guided by the equally brilliant but notorious communicator/media manipulator Karl Rove, the Republicans developed an entirely new language that contained a carefully vetted set of voter-centric strategic massages that were embraced and echoed by the entire party.

If you prefer a more hopeful Democratic example, simply replace Frank Luntz with George Lakoff, and Karl Rove with David Axelrod and you get a similar story. It took the Dems a while to catch on and they don’t always march in lock step the way the Republicans do (or did before the tea party came along), but Barack Obama is President today largely because the party took control of its strategic messages and found a way to galvanize and motivate a broad coalition of old and new voters. Most importantly, they found a way to speak to the base (subscribers, members, donors?) and to undecided voters (younger, more culturally diverse audiences?) at the same time.

For the arts, it’s not about the players or the politics so much as it is about the fact that two enormous, complex, multi-layered, old-fashioned, ego-driven institutions with conflicting priorities and fragmented constituencies (sound familiar?) got their act together, yanked themselves into the 21st century and adopted new, sophisticated, professional and highly effective persuasive communications strategies.

By comparison, the arts industry’s messaging strategy is pretty much what it has always been: find creative ways to get the word out.

Persuading new audiences wouldn’t be difficult or expensive, but it would take centralized leadership, high-level intellectual rigor and an industrywide willingness to abandon amateur traditions in favor of more sophisticated professional approaches. It’s fairly obvious that the arts don’t have the organizational capacity or knowledge to pull something like this off, so I can’t help wondering why the funding community doesn’t step in and take the lead: Find the George Lakoffs who can help us develop a more effective strategic language and use the influence that only funders have to insist that the new language be spoken throughout the sector.

The alternative would appear to be a long, drawn-out process of telling failing arts organizations they’re cut off when they’re no longer able to earn revenue, and watching the industry slowly decline as avid audiences disappear and their less avid heirs seek more attractive, better marketed forms of creative expression.

This is embarrassing. There shouldn’t be ten false marketing assumptions leading the arts astray, let alone twenty.

The more I think and write about my profession, the more convinced I am that the arts have nobody to blame but ourselves for this current predicament. We may not have created the conditions that led to chronic audience declines, but we failed to respond to those declines in a professional manner, and deciding whether to respond as professionals or as amateurs was entirely up to us.

Here are ten more examples of the kind of thinking that’s been holding us back:

Myth 11: Passion for Art is a Must for an Arts Marketer

Reality: Passion for generating earned revenue is the ultimate qualification; legitimate marketing expertise is second; and an ability to personally identify with under-motivated, fence-sitting audiences may well be third. If dispassionate, businesslike, ticket-selling marketers don’t fit the organizational culture, it’s time to change the culture.

Myth 12: Marketers Deserve Less Compensation Than Fundraisers

Reality: There’s no better illustration of the arts industry’s blundering, suicidal incompetence than its tendency to under-invest in professional marketing talent at a time when generating a dependable supply of new paying customers is its only hope for survival. (Don’t get me started.)

Myth 13: Tradition is a Useful Guide

Reality: Arts executives who don’t know what they’re doing tend to rely on tradition for marketing guidance, which is why most arts marketing is old-fashioned, dully repetitive and out of touch with contemporary audiences. Real marketers develop their content in response to up-to-date market intelligence and current competitive market positions.

Myth 14: People Love the Arts

Reality: People like the arts. Some people love them but there are far fewer of those people than there used to be. Marketing to people who merely like the arts requires a new language. The old self-centered language reminded arts lovers to come. The new language has to persuade people to come, which means it has to be about them.

Myth 15: Art is Above Entertainment

Reality: Art is entertainment. Society may once have maintained a distinction between devoting time and attention to art, which was thought to be a ‘higher’ pursuit, and devoting time and attention to lower leisure activities, but that distinction no longer applies. Today the arts compete with all forms of entertainment in a level, democratic, and increasingly user controlled arena.

Myth 16: People Come for the Art

Reality: The play is not necessarily the thing. While older audiences come for the art, newer audiences are just as likely to come for the package. They’re looking for enjoyable ways to do things with friends, families or significant others that include not just the main event (which could be anything) but equally important peripherals such as dining, drinking, shopping, socializing, etc.

Myth 17: Buyers are Motivated by Price

Reality: Buyers are motivated by value. The marketer’s first job is to create value by persuading consumers that the product offers them rewards that transcend its price. The next job is to offer pricing that maximizes the value that’s been created. If it’s done right, the dreaded D-word need never be uttered.

Myth 18: Sales is Icky

Reality: Sales is the new marketing. Every time you hear the word engagement think sales because sales is just community engagement with measurable goals.

Myth 19: Expensive Ad Agencies Can Help

Reality: Agencies don’t sell tickets; they sell creative and media services to clients who want to sell tickets. Huge difference. The only person capable of judging the effectiveness of an agency/client relationship is a client-side marketing pro who knows what sells and who can hold the agency’s feet to the fire. Otherwise, agencies will happily sell arts organizations anything they think they need to buy.

Myth 20: New Audiences are Out There Somewhere

Reality: New audiences, if they exist, are clinging to the ugly, tattered fringes of our current audience – the churning, faithless, last minute, take-it-or-leave-it, ill-behaved audiences we depend on but find so hard to respect. The problem with new audiences isn’t finding them; it’s accepting the ones we have, learning how to respond to their expectations, finding ways to love them, and welcoming others like them into the fold.

Bonus Myth 21: We Can Turn Things Around Without Professional Leadership

Reality: We can’t.

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 met a lot of enthusiastic and optimistic arts marketers at the Artsreach conference last week who were eager to take new skills back to their organizations. But the one refrain I kept hearing was this: “I’d love to do the things you suggest, Trev, but my boss will never go for it.”

You’d think I was pushing some sort of subversive agenda that threatens to bring arts organizations crashing down all around the cultural sector, but the situation is quite the opposite. Arts organizations are doing a fine job of collapsing on their own – without any help from me – and I’m suggesting inexpensive, effective, businesslike ways to speak more persuasively to new audiences.

I’ve been in the trenches long enough to know that the conversations these marketers have when they return home go something like this:

Marketer: Hey, Boss, we’ve developed some new marketing materials that speak more persuasively to new audiences and we’d like you to take a look.

Boss: But these don’t look like our old marketing materials.

Marketer: No, they don’t. We did some research into new audiences and developed messages they find more appealing. It meant pulling back on some of the old clichés and focusing more on the people we’re targeting and what they’ll get out of coming to our events.

Boss: Well, you know me, I’m all about change, but…, um…, Is the arts organization down the street doing this?

Marketer: No. They laid off most of their marketing staff so I doubt they’re doing anything new over there.

Boss: Well… I’m not sure our funders will appreciate this. We can’t afford to jeopardize those relationships. I’ll show it to Millicent Underbridge at the next board meeting, but in the meantime I suggest you put together something that’s more us. We can’t afford to take any risky steps in this economy, especially with our sales numbers so far in the hole. Maybe we can try new things when we get back to normal, but for now we have to stick to what we know works.

Unfortunately, the executive leaders who make these decisions are seldom marketing experts. They have no academic background in marketing; they have limited hands-on experience in arts marketing; they have scant exposure to the way marketing functions in business or corporate environments; and they have little understanding of accepted standards and practices in the broader marketing profession. When it comes to marketing, arts leaders are, by and large, amateurs, yet they’re called upon to make high-stakes decisions that determine whether their organizations will survive in the face of chronic, industry-wide audience attrition.

And that would be fine if those leaders hired and trusted professional marketers to guide them, which is what business leaders do, but they don’t typically do that. More often than not they hire marketers whose experience is confined to the insular nonprofit world and then make certain those marketers conform to the status quo. It sounds like an indictment, but it’s really just a description of a dynamic that’s part of the arts business model – a part we might want to recognize and fix before it’s too late to make productive changes.

The arts have been suffering steady audience declines for the last three decades yet we’ve been sending the same marketing messages the entire time. No industry with professional marketing would do that.

It’s time for the arts to make a major professional upgrade in the way we communicate with the world around us. We need to know exactly who our new audiences are; we need to do the necessary research to understand what they want; and then we need to develop sophisticated messaging strategies that describe how our products will satisfy their yearnings. And on the flip side, we have to stop preaching to a shrinking audience of dying fans with hackneyed nonsense language and off-putting imagery. We need new audiences as much as we need old audiences and it’s time to start talking to them both at the same time.

So if you’re an arts exec and your marketer comes home from a conference with good ideas for motivating new audiences, embrace those ideas and put them to work – even if it means changing comfortable old habits. Or better yet, come with your marketer to the next conference and get the eduction you need to become the executive marketing expert that your arts organization deserves.

Here’s a coda to my snarky post from earlier this week. I’m taking this opportunity to turn my impatient diatribe into some constructive, useful suggestions.

There’s a lot of room for improvement in arts marketing, most notably in the area of message development. With audiences in steady decline, it’s more important than ever to make sure that the content of our communications is as effective as possible.

The following list contains several criteria that can be used to measure the relative effectiveness of arts marketing messages. If you want to evaluate the effectiveness of your marketing materials, preferably before you send them out, ask yourself if they are:

Fresh. Do they speak to audiences, both old and new, with thoughtful, original words and images that are free of tired clichés and old, formulaic design or copy templates?

Humble. Do they offer something of value, not by telling people how valuable the product is, but rather by describing how it will satisfy their desires? (The difference here is huge.)

Strategic. Do they leverage factual information about the audience’s needs, wants and desires to motivate them to participate by describing how the product will make them happy?

Real. Do they touch people by speaking to their hearts and minds in a natural, personal, colloquial language they understand?

Meaningful. Do they make sense? Even the attention-getters? Are you sure? (Hint: If you’ve said “Celebrate!” and you’re not inviting someone to a party, it doesn’t make sense.)

Sensitive. Do they avoid using words and images that outsiders find off-putting?

Unselfish. Do they spend as much time talking about how happy the customers will be when they buy the product as they do about how wonderful the product is?

Professional. Are they designed and executed according to accepted best practices in the marketing profession (not just the nonprofit arts)?

Developing arts marketing messages according to these criteria will guarantee better across-the-board results and increased participation from new audiences. Why? Because they’re audience-centric. Best practices in marketing always focus on what the customers want and on how the products will make them happy.

Traditional arts marketing is self-centric and assumes that audiences will participate by virtue of the inherent quality, value and desirability of the products. It’s a valid approach, but it only works when the market contains enough people who already believe the products are worth their time and money.

I said in my last post that arts marketing sucks and that wasn’t entirely fair. There’s a lot of great stuff happening in arts marketing – especially where message delivery technology is concerned, but until we start rebuilding audiences and guaranteeing dependable long-term sources of earned revenue, it’s vital that we exploit every opportunity for improvement.

Fortunately – and this is the best part – it’s all free. Developing marketing content that’s fresh, humble, strategic, real, meaningful, sensitive, unselfish and professional is not something you buy, it’s something you simply do.

Arts marketing sucks.

Sorry to be so blunt, but it’s nothing I haven’t said here before.

It sucks because it’s old-fashioned, out of date, cliché-ridden and naïve. The language of arts marketing was developed for 20th century arts lovers who are now dead or dying, but we’re still using it on 21st century non-arts lovers who don’t find it relevant or persuasive.

It sucks because it’s narcissistic, presumptuous and condescending. If new audiences thought we were as wonderful and important as we constantly tell them we are, we’d be successful beyond measure.

It sucks because it lacks strategic integrity. Genuinely persuasive marketing is built on sound market intelligence and rational methodologies, but arts marketing is built on tradition, wishful thinking, creativity and the tastes and opinions of arts insiders.

It sucks because it’s artificial. Nobody talks like arts marketing. The language is so far removed from contemporary colloquial human communication that if anyone actually spoke it they’d be ridiculed, shunned or locked up.

It sucks because it’s meaningless. “Celebrate Live Theatre” and its cousins are perennially popular phrases that, in addition to being hackneyed and rhetorically impotent, suggests things that no human being would actually do – let alone endeavor to do by buying a ticket to an arts event.

It sucks because it’s off-putting. Orchestral concerts are about people gathering to listen to really good live music, but they might as well be about sweaty, overdressed men gesticulating with tiny white sticks. We don’t sell art, we sell the trappings of art, and for new audiences those trappings can be deal breakers.

It sucks because it’s all about us and not about them. Good marketing should be as much about the customer as it is about the product. Arts marketing is almost exclusively about the organizations, the artists and the events.

It sucks because it’s quasi-professional at a time when full-on professionalism may be the only hope for survival. There are a lot of people in the arts, including leaders who should know better, who still believe that marketing is a qualitative, common sense function that any creative person with a passion for the arts (a.k.a. amateur) can do.

So why the pointed diatribe? Because someone suggested to me yesterday – and this was by no means the first time I’d heard it – that the answers to our audience development problems lay in changing our programming to make it more appealing to new audiences. That if new audiences don’t want to buy the art we’re selling, we should produce and present art that new audiences want to buy.

Forgive me for for having the temerity to suggest that there’s nothing wrong with art the way it is, but if the marketing sucks, shouldn’t we fix the marketing before we start trying to fix the art?

In the past three weeks I’ve posted six tips for gaining meaningful insight into new audience motives. See if you can find a through line:

1. Talk to your new audience when they come to your events

2. Use published research

3. Listen to your new audience through informal focus group research

4. Interact with new audiences on their turf through meaningful community engagement

5. Establish two-way relationships with new audiences through executive sales programs

6. Seek new audience’s input on marketing language while it’s being developed

Uh-huh.

It’s not so much about research as it is about relationships – and relationships cost nothing.

The reason we suck at building new audiences is that we don’t know who they are and we rarely talk to them. It’s just not in our culture. Somehow we’ve come to believe that marketing, or God forbid “communications,” means sitting in conference rooms packaging self-congratulatory insider messages into little rectangles and spraying them at the world outside – hoping they’ll reach enough people who care to meet our sales goals. But, as recent news about symphony orchestras suggests, it’s not a very productive survival strategy.

So here’s one more tip: Close the executive offices every Thursday at noon and insist that every staff member in marketing, PR, sales, development, executive leadership, outreach, education and general management make appointments with key community figures and spend the day out in the real world establishing personal relationships with buyers, donors, sales partners, marketing partners, service organizations, sponsors, supporters, opinion leaders, educators, media reps, bloggers – you name it. Change the insider orientation to an outsider orientation. Bring an external perspective back into the conference room and start communicating with new audiences in a natural, personal, outsider-oriented language that’s more about them than it is about us.