Understanding audiences means more than being able to call up their booking history
by Morris Hargreaves | Arts Marketing Association
Photo by Martin Laine used under Creative Commons
This week the first of a number of our clients (92nd Street Y in New York) are going live with an app we’ve developed to capture and integrate qualitative factors into individual box office records (including their Culture Segment). The second will be The Place here in the UK. It’s really satisfying to see 18 months’ work come to fruition. But more than that, I’m excited about how it will help them understand and develop meaningful relationships with audiences.
For 18 years I worked in marketing, mostly in performing arts. I began in the days when our box offices used to basically sell raffle tickets for concerts, put the cash in a box and write it down in a book. For those who don’t go back this far, I’m not joking.
I remember in technicolour my first computerised box office system.
I’d been banging on about the need for it for an age, so when it finally arrived, I was delirious, and agreed to shut up for the rest of my life. After all, all the information we needed was now there, at the push of a button.
Previously we’d had to rely on people scanning leaflet racks and reading listings in the local paper to find out about our shows, which was at best hit and miss. It sounds unbelievably basic now, but simply having at our fingertips details of people who’d previously booked, so we could contact them to see if they wanted more, was huge.
Of course over time we got far more sophisticated in our analysis of behavioural patterns of current bookers. We extracted lists of prospects using complex combinations of art form and production choices; seats selected; frequency; party size; spend; planning horizons; day of week and geography. We even added Mosaic profiles to our records.
And in the performing arts sector we were thankful we had access to so much more data than those who were largely unticketed, such as museums and galleries.
Knowing what someone has done in the past is not a good enough indicator of what they might do in the future.
While these systems do tell us in enormous detail WHAT our current audiences are doing, what they can’t tell us is WHY they do these things. No amount of analysis of this data will answer this question. Someone’s age does not describe how they feel about art, and their postcode doesn’t tell us why they might want culture in their lives. If we’re serious about developing audiences, we need to understand what motivates people to engage with what we offer.
What are they seeking to get out of it?
What kind of experiences are they looking for?
How do they hope to be made to feel?
How does it reflect their values and beliefs and the way they see themselves in the world?
We need to understand what drives and motivates people if we want to influence their behaviour and succeed in meeting their needs. As my colleague Andrew McIntyre says: we need to stop counting heads and start understanding what goes on inside those heads.
And it seems we forgot to look up…
While the performing arts had its head stuck a long way up its own box office system, museums and galleries had already worked this out.
In the absence of a postcode for every single visitor, they were busy asking themselves what they really needed to know. What information was actually going to help them reach their potential and fulfil visitors’ needs? They went about collecting and modelling this information. Tate was among the first to realize the benefits of attitudinal segmentation and the British Library and others followed suit.
The museums and galleries sector may have stolen a march on the performing arts but it isn’t a competition, and the performing arts could end up with the best of both worlds.
What I am suggesting is simple. If you want to know what your audience thinks and how they feel: ask them.
The information we’ve got doesn’t help us make sense of the complex patterns in our box offices. By supplementing the quantitative data already held in our systems with another layer of more sophisticated qualitative measures (at record level), we can truly harness their power.
With this insight, we won’t have to rely on seeing who booked for a particular playwright, director or composer before. We won’t need to repeatedly mail the same people time and again, fixing them into their current pattern. We can understand who might enjoy a particular experience – including those who’ve not been for a while (which is actually most people). And then as well as telling them what’s on, we’ll know how to craft a really resonant message.
You can’t do this with existing data. You’re going to have to talk to your audiences – and be willing to listen to what they say. But surely that can never be a bad thing?