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ARTS
MARKETING
INSIGHTS
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ARTS
MARKETING
INSIGHTS
The Dynamics of
Building and Retaining
Performing Arts
Audiences
Joanne Scheff Bernstein
Foreword by
Philip Kotler
John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
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Copyright © 2007 by Joanne Scheff Bernstein. All rights reserved.
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Bernstein, Joanne Scheff, date.
Arts marketing insights : the dynamics of building and retaining
performing arts audiences/Joanne Scheff Bernstein ; foreword by Philip
Kotler.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN-13: 978-0-7879-7844-0
ISBN-10: 0-7879-7844-2
1. Performing arts—Marketing. I. Title.
PN1590.M227B47 2007
791.069’8—dc22 2006029093
Printed in the United States of America
FIRSTEDITION
HB Printing 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
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Contents
Foreword vii
Philip Kotler
Introduction xi
The Author xix
Prologue 1
The State of Performing Arts Attendance and the
State of Marketing 5
Exploring Characteristics of Current and Potential
Performing Arts Audiences 25
Understanding the Consumer Mind-Set 49
Planning Strategy and Applying the Strategic Marketing
Process 65
Using Strategic Marketing to Define, Deliver, and
Communicate Value 89
v
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vi Contents
Delivering Value Through Pricing Strategies 117
Conducting and Using Marketing Research 143
Leveraging the Internet and E-Mail Marketing 163
Identifying and Capitalizing on Brand Identity 193
Building Loyalty: Subscriptions and Beyond 209
Valuing the Single Ticket Buyer 235
Focusing on the Customer Experience and Delivering
Great Customer Service 249
Epilogue 263
Notes 267
Index 281
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Foreword
The arts are essential to the health of a nation. Just as food, clothing,
and housing are essential to physical well-being, art is essential to the
social and spiritual nourishing of our lives. Life would be dreary in a
society without music, song, dance, film, books, and the visual arts.
Joanne and I published our book Standing Room Only in 1997,
more than nine years ago. In these times of accelerating change, nine
years is like twenty years in terms of sound prescriptions for success.
Today discretionary money is scarcer, time budgets are strained, and
competitive activities have proliferated, with the result that filling the
seats for performances is getting increasingly difficult. Furthermore,
in the past several years there have been significant changes in peo-
ple’s lifestyles, increased spontaneity in choosing leisure time pursuits,
and new expectations in terms of excellent and responsive customer
service.
Contrary to many people’s belief that interest in the arts is wan-
ing, there is and, I imagine, always will be a significant proportion of
the population that truly enjoys attending arts events. But many of
the audience development strategies that worked in the past are no
longer as viable as they once were. Furthermore, marketers’ insensi-
tivity to the ways customers prefer to do business and the types of mes-
sages that will serve to attract audience members is actually creating
barriers to attendance. At best many marketers are perpetually work-
ing harder to retain their audiences and attract new ones. At the worst
vii
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viii Foreword
many symphonies, theaters, opera companies, and dance companies
are facing extreme financial difficulties.
Marketing is not the art of finding clever ways to fill your seats.
Marketing is the art of creating genuine customer value. It is the art
of helping your customers become better off. The marketer’s watch-
words are quality, service, and value.
A mark of sound management in any organization is to review the
new market conditions, the competition (both inside and outside the
arts world), and the mind-set of consumers, and then revise old as-
sumptions and launch new marketing initiatives for breathing new life
into the performing arts business.
To assist your thinking, Joanne Scheff Bernstein, one of the most
effective consultants and educators on the performing arts, offers you
a guide to the new market factors and the new strategies, based on
sound marketing principles, that will improve your audience devel-
opment results now and into the future. She offers not only a review of
long-standing best practices but also a multitude of viable alternatives
to those practices that no longer attract and retain audiences as they
formerly did. She helps you to understand the customer mind-set and
to leverage the many new opportunities created by the digital revolu-
tion and its manifestations, especially Web-marketing and e-mail.
I view this new book, Arts Marketing Insights,as the performing
arts bible for the times. I encourage every arts manager and marketer,
student and teacher of arts management, and board member of an arts
organization to read this book and discuss every chapter with their
peers. The dialogue alone will spark new ideas in your arts organiza-
tion for substantially increasing attendance and funding and for cre-
ating better satisfied customers.
Philip Kotler
Kellogg School of Management
Northwestern University
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This book is dedicated with boundless love
to my wonderful husband, Bob, who shares my love of the arts,
and to my darling grandchildren, Cecilia, Daniel, Ryan, and Harper,
who have just begun to experience the delights and inspiration
the arts will offer them throughout their lives.
Description:Audience behavior began to shift dramatically in the mid 1990s. Since then, people have become more spontaneous in purchasing tickets and increasingly prefer selecting specific programs to attend rather than buying a subscription series. Arts attenders also expect more responsive customer service th
