JRosenfield Article

What's an Arts Marketer to Do?

James R. Rosenfield

How woeful is the role of today's arts marketers!

Caught between tiny budgets and sometimes tinier audiences, they hear the sirens call "Dumb it down!"

Vendors selling customer relationship management software whisper sweet promises of economic salvation. Art directors and copywriters entertain their fancies at the arts organization's expense. Ad agencies waste everyone's time and money, sometimes on a pro bono basis, making critical judgment seem a form of ingratitude.

Alas, arts organizations are natural suckers for volunteer work done gratis . A gratis web site is worth what you pay for. Yet the arts marketer will be pummeled by management and the Board should he or she refuse the free blandishments and choose to do something professional instead.

And arts organizations are natural suckers for "creativity," which gives ad agencies license to do their fanciest stuff. Every arts direct mailing can be simplified and made cheaper, for example, without any loss and even without much effort. (Iron law: Always sacrifice unit cost for circulation. Produce cheaper direct mail pieces and mail more of them. Do smaller print ads and run them more often.)

What's a poor arts marketer to do?

Get smart. Get tough. And don't dumb it down - you'll lose the intelligent people, and the stupid ones won't get it anyway.

Some ways of getting smart:

1) Build your brand, but in a 21st Century way.

Arts organizations, abetted by regressive ad agencies and consultants, identify brand with image. Image is only part of it, and by no means the most important part.

In the world of the early 21st Century, brand equals the customer's experience. The experience has two components: the product itself, and the services surrounding the product.

In the commercial world, services have now become more important than product. Products are at parity. Quality is high. Every mobile phone works well. It's the network and customer service that create differentiation. Automobiles, even American ones, run dependably. It's the showroom and maintenance process that spell the difference.

Translated into arts terms, the product is the performance or the exhibition. Any professional musicians or curators are going to put on a high-quality show, let's assume. Like the commercial world, services provide the differentiation, but services are more complicated in the case of the arts. They include:

--Getting the ticket.

--Refunding or exchanging the ticket.

--The seat itself in a performance.

--The audience. Does a patron have noisy neighbors at a concert? Is the museum unpleasantly crowded? The arts organization may have limited control over this sort of thing, but every contact counts, even ones that can't be controlled. There is no such thing as a neutral contact. Everything that touches the patron either builds or erodes the brand.

--Transportation convenience or lack of same, including parking availability and convenience.

--Venue

I am a Patron of Carnegie Hall, which entitles me not only to an occasional banquet and free concert, but also to special dedicated concierge service. The concierge knows both other patrons and me personally, and is perpetually helpful in getting tickets. Helped by simple but efficient software, he knows my favorite, second favorite, third favorite seats. My loyalty to Carnegie Hall revolves as much around him and the Patron experience as around the fabled venue and its astounding concerts.

2) Think in terms of benefits.

People buy benefits, not products. That's an axiom among for-profit marketers, and should be one in the world of the arts also.

Negative reductionism is the great mistake of commercial marketers when it comes to benefits. Spend an hour, if you dare, in front of the television, and watch ads demonstrating a veritable panoply of the deadly sins, with envy, greed, and lust in the starring roles. When the ad agency (on a pro bono basis, usually, which makes things tricky. See above.) turns its attention to the arts, reductionism can be become destructive indeed.

Why? Because one of the roles of the arts is to get us outside the envy, greed, and anger of our everyday lives. Rather than the seven deadly sins, arts benefits should revolve around four words beginning with the letter "C."

--Control.

Control and fear of its loss are motivating passions of the early 21st Century.

This has a great deal to do with technology. The technologies that run our lives create an almost instant dependency. We lived our lives quite nicely until recently without mobile phones. Nowadays, though, if the phone doesn't work, we panic: Loss of control!

When I lose my theater ticket, I have lost control. The arts organization has to offer easy and instant solutions to this kind of problem.

But on a far deeper level, the arts can provide a kind of spiritual control. Do not forget this.

--Contact.

How do you stay in touch with your constituents? Direct mail? Email? Telephone? All of the above? It should be all of the above, with the understanding that 1) People hate telemarketing, even though it might work for you 2) Patrons should be allowed to control the extent and frequency of your contacts. In email especially there needs to be an unsubscribe option in every contact.

How do your constituents get in touch with you? Always maximize the channels. That means physical box office, telephone, mail, fax, phone, and email.

--Change.

People have a sense of living in a highly volatile world, and are increasingly nervous about change.

Any changes you make should be carefully merchandised. This includes even good changes. For example, if you're simplifying your subscription process, keep in mind that longtime patrons have accommodated themselves to your system and are used to it. They will be temporarily discommoded by any change. So be sure to alert them to it first.

There should be a special 800-number set up to handle questions generated by changes. The telephone process must allow for easy access to a live human being (good advice in any kind of incoming call situation, in fact).

--Complexity.

I'm on the Board of an arts organization whose ticket ordering forms look like formulas for DNA trying to turn into RNA. You don't want to do that. Keep it simple.

People perceive their lives these days as much too complicated, and getting more so all the time. Anything you can do to make life simpler will bond you and your patrons.

For example, arts organizations' web sites tend to be more complicated than they need be (and more expensive, also). Skip the fancy introductions featuring music and gauzy photos, and begin with a clean, clear home page.

3) Be wary of experts.

The poor arts marketer! Arts marketing specialists often specialize in nothing but making a few quick bucks from you. Software vendors whose commercial clients are on to their tricks turn their greedy beady eyes to you, and you only! Ad agencies, as we observed earlier, do pro bono work that's worth what it costs, and has the hidden agenda of building the agency's portfolio with you as the guinea pig.

Don't be a sucker. Get smart. Get tough. Get good. Get references. Get going!