Arts Intranet

Deborah Obalil

It's been interesting to read various marketing experts and pundits over the past year or so declare the death of marketing as we know it in various forums. And, of course, we've all heard the platitudes of social media experts regarding the “customer being in control” and “it's all about them, not you.”

It is true that the traditional interpretation of the Marketing Ps (product, price, place, promotion) may feel outdated in a world where people engage as often virtually as they do physically. And social media has definitely been a game changer in regards to customer relationships and communications strategy.

While I often find little to argue with in the details of these various exhortations, the conclusion that all of this means marketing is dead or vastly different at its core from what it was ten or more years ago confounds me.

I have always understood marketing to be “the process by which you come to understand the relationship between the product and the customer.” I don't think this definition has become false because of all the changes in the platforms we use to connect with our customers, or even because the needs of our customers may be vastly different from what they were a decade ago.

David Dombrosky

For years now, we have been talking about the latest tools and the best practices for incorporating these tools into our marketing and communications strategies. Of course, this is a necessary conversation in which we need to continually engage, but there is a corollary discussion that also needs to take place regularly.

As technology advances and communication-based behaviors adapt to these advances, arts marketers find themselves adding new tactics to their marketing strategies in order to stay current in meeting audience expectations. So the corollary discussion that we need to have is, “If we need to add new tactics to keep pace with changing technology and patron behavior, then which older tactics can we afford to lose?”

During the past five years of leading online technology workshops for arts managers, one of the most frequent concerns expressed by participants has been the ever-increasing workload. We’ve added social media to our plates, as well as mobile applications, broadcast emails, SMS campaigns, and more. But what have we taken away?

I am a HUGE proponent of partnerships! There is nothing like getting in front of a group that is loyal to a certain brand, and have that brand state that your organization has value for the group to also support you. Throughout a season, we work with numerous partners to reach new audiences, from arts organizations to corporations and beyond.

Here are some of the more successful partnerships we have had:

Dracula's Night at the Bats

Dracula’s Night at the Bats: A fully integrated campaign with Louisville Slugger Field and our baseball team, the Louisville Bats. Dracula threw out the first pitch (a bit high, but right down the middle), we had a table set up behind home plate, our promotional video was played on the jumbotron in the outfield, we gave away an opportunity to purchase $10 tickets to an entire section and  one lucky person won two season ticket packages (and Dracula handed them out on the third-base dugout).

The benefit: Exposure to a different audience in a fun and interactive way. It showed potential patrons that theatre is not as intimidating as they might think. While there was not much advance promotion of this event, the face time we had with the thousands of people at the event was invaluable.

Deborah Obalil

In reading the excellent posts by Susannah Greenwood (Questions of Musical Engagement), Mary Trudel (Oh yes – there's an app for that), and Ian David Moss (Arts participation and the bottom of the pyramid) it becomes very clear that technology is enabling, and to a degree forcing, arts organizations to use sampling as a marketing strategy.  Now product sampling is a marketing strategy that has been around for quite some time.  Marketers have long known that if you get a taste of something good,  you'll buy lots of it.  It also requires that whomever is producing the product (the artist or arts organization in our case) to go to the people it wants to connect with to provide the sample.  In the not-so-distant past, this was a resource intensive proposition for the arts, especially the performing arts.

Early in my career I was the marketing director for a contemporary concert dance presenter, and we did lots of sampling, we just didn't call it that.  We called them previews or lecture/demonstrations.  The dance companies we presented would be trotted all over town to libraries and schools, public plazas and community gatherings.  And we would have information at all of these events about the upcoming theatrical performances and how to get tickets.  Since most of the companies we presented were far from household names (even for dance afficionados), giving potential audiences a taste of what the would get for the ticket price was crucial to building audience.

Like many before me and many to come, I came to Silicon Valley for the Chips -- specifically, Chip Heath, co-author of Made to Stick and Switch, and one of my heroes Chip Conley, owner of Joie de Vivre hotels (who I actually admitted to having a brain crush on via Twitter). Both Chips were keynotes at the 2010 National Arts Marketing Project Conference held in San Jose this weekend.

The first time I listened to Chip Conley (who tweeters at the conference have immortalized with the hash tag hotchip) and as I read Peak, I thought a lot about how Arts Alliance Illinois, primarily an arts advocacy organization, could “refresh the identity” of Illinois arts practitioners and leaders through advocacy.

But this time, maybe because I’m still thinking about Election Day, I was thinking about a Hierarchy of Needs for elected officials. Specifically, what is transformation for elected officials. If you were an elected official, what would it mean to be all you can be?

Before you begin the snarky comments, let me take a step back – for all of you wondering what the Hierarchy of Needs is, how this is connected to Chip Conley, and what it means to refresh an identity.

You may have heard the term “Hierarchy of Needs” in a psychology class or on your Lincoln-Douglas debate team if you’re a dork like me. Abraham Maslow, a professor of psychology, invented the term when he decided to shift the gaze of psychologists from the “worst case scenarios” in humanity to those living the happiest and most satisfying lives. He discovered a hierarchy of needs – from basic survival to transformation – that defines human existence. Here’s my rendition:

Photo credit: Flickr user Khalid Almasoud.

The bottom layer is all about physiological needs: food, drink, air, and sleep. Next up are your safety needs. Then there are needs related to love and belonging, followed by esteem needs. On top of the pyramid is self-actualizing, being all you can be.