Last week there was some interesting discussion around Doug McLennan’s post on diacritical Pay Attention! If Selling Tickets Is Your Business Model, You’ve Got A Problem about the “Attention Economy” and Andrew Taylor’s response What, exactly, do you sell. I think this discussion is a great companion to yesterday’s post on recovery consumer trends.
McLennan kicked off the discussion by addressing the shifts from manufacturing to transportation to experience to attention economies. McLennan states “In the infinite choice marketplace, ideas and products only get traction if they get noticed.” He notes as usual that the arts are behind others in addressing the shifts:
If you believe your business model is the classic consumer transaction (I make the performance, you buy the ticket) then you’re done. Sorry. That’s a Manufacturing Economy mindset, and while it worked when choices were limited, now that you’re competing in the infinite marketplace offering 8000 or 8 million choices, it’s increasingly unlikely that your “audience” is going to choose you as often as they did in the past.
In the Attention Economy it isn’t enough to be the best orchestra or theatre or dance company. People aren’t comparing you with other orchestras or theatre or dance companies; they’re measuring whether classical music or theatre or dance is something they want to choose at the moment. They’re deciding whether they want an active or passive experience; they’re trying to determine what level of social encounter they feel like today. They’re weighing whether they want a predictable, known, comfortable quantity or whether they want to be adventurous and try something new. They’re figuring out whether they want to learn something and are willing to work for that or whether they’re looking for pure entertainment that costs them little. Price matters – if it’s going to cost, it’s got to be better than the free alternative. It doesn’t matter that there are 47 varieties of spaghetti sauce on the shelf in front of me if what I really want is pesto.
The choice is bewildering. Paralyzing, even. You can’t compete with such overwhelming choice with a consumer transaction model, no matter if you’re the Philadelphia Orchestra, the Metropolitan Opera or the Guthrie Theatre.
The responses to the post address key issues – power imbalance between consumers (audiences) and manufacturers (arts orgs), stepping beyond marketing, the inevitable focus on the bottom-line and traditional earned revenue ideas, institution-building over creation of art, relevancy (perhaps the word that appears most in this blog) to our communities, and the need for human to human live connection in addition to virtual communities.
Andrew Taylor of Artful Manager (another daily must read) quickly posted his response addressing a key point that the audiences we have had for years and the work we have produced may be outdated or holding us back:
The deeper challenge for arts organizations is that they DO sell a product, even as they DON’T. That is, an important segment of any arts audience doesn’t recognize the complex bundle they’re seeking when they buy a symphony or theater ticket. They’ve come to use that event as a placeholder or proxy for that bundle, without even knowing it. To this core group (often the most passionate about the art form, the most loyal buyers, the most committed donors) the bundle IS the product. And as you innovate around the delivery or context of your creative work, you challenge their passionate connection to the discipline’s tradition.
It’s not necessarily a generational divide, although generation cohort likely plays a part. But rather it’s a challenge of serving multiple audiences with widely varying interests and expectations.
McLennan posted a follow-up Ticket Sales, Business Models & Community – Five Ideas To Build Community the next day expanding on the thought that community (as exemplified by social media) is key to building relationships and elevating an organization above the plethora of choices available to fill their time.
This all circles back neatly to yesterday’s post on consumer trends because community is the key to addressing all of those trends as well. The strength of the performing arts is in bringing people together to share something, we create community by creating art. This has to be applied to how we run our organizations and how we interact with the world around us. We MUST define and enact how we will do this in the near and distant future. We cannot cling to the old ideas or methods. It is up to the current generation of leaders and those rising in the ranks to take charge and re-center our institutions large and small.
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