Seminar: Understanding and Using Research for More Effective Marketing Strategies

Monday, October 18, 2004

Kate Prescott, President of Prescott & Associates in Pittsburgh, presented a seminar at Settlement Music School on Understanding and Using Research for More Effective Marketing Strategies. Attended by approximately thirty individuals representing Greater Philadelphia’s nonprofit music organizations, Ms. Prescott explored how the staff of these organizations might improve their marketing strategies by making better use of extant market research. Prescott reviewed several of the major research studies that have been conducted recently regarding arts participation and spent a significant portion of the seminar explaining the charts and numbers generated in the studies.

She began by pointing out that many artistic organizations make the mistake of believing that everyone is their audience, that they are marketing to everybody. In fact, Prescott explained, only a modest percentage of the population represents a viable potential audience; organizations’ marketing efforts are most effective when directed at that population. Also, she noted that audiences reported a wide array of reasons for not attending artistic and cultural events. In other words, rather than there being one obstacle between organizations and potential audiences, there are in fact numerous, minor hurdles, and there will be no one method for filling seats.

Prescott went on to speak from her own experience of conducting marketing services for the Pittsburgh Ballet, including taking phone surveys regarding particular shows. She closely compared the language used for more and less successful productions. Interestingly, survey participants said that they liked both types of productions. The more successful productions, however, were described in glowing, personal terms that resonated with each listener’s life experience.

She described the success of special offers made to audience members to go backstage at the Pittsburgh Ballet; they were eager to see what goes on behind the scenes, she said. Also, she recommended that organizations aim to offer their audiences “flow,” defined by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi as the “best moments” that “occur when a person’s body or mind is stretched to its limits in a voluntary effort to accomplish something difficult and worthwhile.” Not a simple task! But it is one that musical performance has lived up to for centuries.