Why does marketing always feel like a constant battle in nonprofit theater? One that we slowly seem to be losing. Why do we keep hearing about engagement, the engagement economy, and arts engagement? How does engagement work? Do marketing and engagement have anything to do with each other? The answers to these questions may not be as hard to find as you might think.
Oxford University Press has released our new book, How to Market the Arts: A Practical Approach for the 21st Century. The book explores these questions and more by carefully walking through the traditional theories of marketing, detailing why the nonprofit arts struggle so mightily with trying to apply them successfully and explaining how the construct of engagement can be implemented successfully. We call the approach The Engagement Edge and use the model to demonstrate a fundamental shift in how we can serve our communities. The book details plenty of case studies with interviews (including Felix Barrett’s Sleep No More and the Public Theatre’s engagement program) to explore the concepts but leaves open the unique ways in which theaters can apply this new approach.
Before you dismiss the idea, thinking that your theatre does have an engagement plan, consider that most nonprofit arts organizations end up providing outreach (in which they bring art into the community) rather than true engagement in which community members work with the theatre to facilitate the co-creation of arts experiences.
When Eugene McCarthy first developed the basis for modern-day marketing in the 1950’s, the foundation on which all marketing today is built, nonprofit arts organizations as we now know them didn’t exist. Nonprofit peculiarities have never gibed with the marketing mix model, known as the four Ps. This mix, as McCarthy called it, was like a recipe in which ingredients were blended to create just the right balance. Those four ingredients are Product, Price, Place, and Promotion. The marketing mix centers on profit generation, while nonprofit arts organizations exist for the purpose of community service. You can see the problem. When we use traditional marketing methods, we are trying to sell to the community instead of serving it through engagement.
We aren’t suggesting that anyone should stop conducting marketing that is proving successful. However, where there are community members who are not yet served by a theatre, our construct of The Engagement Edge is a way to reach them. Instead of the four Ps, it uses the four Es: Experience, Ease of Access, Environment, and Education.
Product and Experience
McCarthy noted that products can be goods, services, or ideas with “the capacity to provide the satisfaction, use, or perhaps the profit desired by the consumer.” The interesting thing is that the consumer doesn’t have to know they want something. The marketing manager does the analysis and research to understand the consumer’s thinking about a product, helps shape the product to satisfy consumers, and communicates an effective message to close the sale. To us, this seems at odds with nonprofit arts where the creation of art remains almost entirely at the sole discretion of artists, free from market pressures. As we say in the book, “Although the manager may position the artistic product as an artist’s representation of society, each piece of art, whether a ballet, symphony, statue, painting, or concert, has a unique relationship to each consumer.ii” Because of this, we recognize that the art itself is not really a product as our colleagues in marketing define that term. Instead, art is something that exists when it is experienced by an audience.
This means not just that our audiences “experience” something, since we are now living in the “experience economy,” but that because of the art they have an experience. Almost a century ago philosopher John Dewey gave us the notion of “Art as Experience,” and his prophetic ideas drive The Engagement Edge, which proposes that the arts experience begins when someone first becomes aware of the art and ends when critical and emotional thinking about the art no longer have precedence in a consumer’s mind. Arts experiences are more than just an hour or two in a darkened room with artwork. Because they are experiences, they are unique to everyone.
We say this in the book: “It is important to consider that the artist conceives art as an interpretation or reflection of something, even if those viewing it may have a very different experience. The visual arts bring about different thoughts, feelings, and emotions based on the viewer, their circumstances, and their personal history. All art forms are in a constant state of flux, allowing for continuous interpretation and appreciation, and can be conceived as a collaborative experience. The audience participates in that once a connection has been made, there becomes an inward observation, and the encounter becomes a personal experience.”
We like to think of it like this: a tube of toothpaste doesn’t require a toothbrusher in order to be a product. A hotel room lease is still a service with or without a guest. “Art, however, does not exist until it occurs in an audience, so it is neither product nor service. It is a participatory process which requires the consumer of the process, and without whom the art becomes simply a rehearsal or paint on a canvas.”
Price and Ease of Access
Price is the one P that generates actual revenue. Although we think of price as being money, it is actually a bundle of the costs of acquiring a good or service. That includes things like time and effort. In marketing, there are myriad ways we can set price to balance with consumer needs.
In the nonprofit arts, however, price is not the only construct that generates revenue. The nonprofit arts also generate revenue through fundraising. Unlike most for profit corporations, some nonprofit arts organizations provide free arts events as their primary goal is service rather than profits. In the book, we note that “because the marketing mix does not readily incorporate the vagaries of fundraising and fund development, the traditional approaches for applying pricing strategy are stymied by the unique nature of the nonprofit arts.” The challenge then becomes, how do we appropriately price the arts? It’s not about money. It’s about access! “The nonprofit arts manager must understand the barriers to access for community members and make strides to ease that access, not necessarily by altering the monetary cost of the access but by engaging with the community about their needs.”
“Ease of access is the process of reducing obstacles to help provide access to an offering. It considers more than the exchange between individual and organization. Sometimes, like when organizations provide free offerings, there is no exchange. Even in a free offering from an arts organization, obstacles exist that can hinder potential participation from community members. People experience varying levels of ease of access depending on how many obstacles exist, how those obstacles impact them individually, and how those obstacles occur to them.iii This mix of obstacles means that some people have an easier time accessing arts organizations’ offerings than others. Ease of access focuses on reducing obstacles for all current and potential audience members.”
Place and Environment
For every nonprofit arts marketer following McCarthy’s four Ps, the P of Place is almost useless. Place refers to all the touchpoints a product or service meets between its beginning of creation to its consumption by a consumer. In the commercial world this means distribution. Companies contract with suppliers, vendors, salespeople, shippers, warehouses, promoters, distributors, retailers, servicers, repair facilities, and on and on. Commercial products can pass through scores of hands before getting to the consumer. In the nonprofit arts, there are no distribution networks. Sure, maybe a Broadway tour or a service like TicketMaster could be considered distributors under the moniker of Place, but those are commercial enterprises. “There appears to be very little correlation between the P of place and nonprofit arts marketing unless you consider the actual space where viewing art occurs to be essentially the entire manifestation of place.”
We like to think that “the concept of environment is not only the physical place in which we occupy space but also the emotional and mental aspects of that place.” To us, Environment embodies, “the qualities of those locations where audience members go during the entire process of the experience. This description refers to the qualities of places where interaction occurs from the moment the consumer becomes aware of the offering up to, and even after the point when, the entire artistic experience is consummated.” Although the most intense part of the experience is likely the viewing of the art, the experience includes things like buying the ticket, having a meal before the art event, the places one travels through to get to the art, and even the environment for a discussion about the art after its viewing. “We cannot control the qualities of all these environments, but a solid plan considers the most frequent touchpoint environments and seeks to control or quasi-control as many qualities as possible.”
Promotion and Education
“The term promotion is often the most misunderstood in the marketing mix, as it is the foundation upon which McCarthy’s scientific approach was built, advertising. In fact, promotion refers to the communications and communication methodology used to disseminate information about the product. Though it includes communication strategy, design, and delivery through various selected communication channels, its fundamental concept is to effectively persuade the consumer.”
“Every year, hundreds of billions of dollars are spent on advertising in the United States alone. That is an incredible sum of money dedicated to convincing us to make purchases. When for-profit corporations use promotional tactics, they work; so, it makes sense that nonprofit arts organizations would desire to gather customers through traditional promotional channels. Although not all for-profit corporations that sell products turn a profit each year, the vast majority of those that do use promotion to persuade people to make a purchase.”
The primary function of a nonprofit is service, not profit for owners. So, the idea of persuading the very community they are there to serve is misguided. If an organization is truly serving its community, and some members who could appreciate the service are not participating, we argue that the goal of a nonprofit arts organization is to educate the community about the service rather than persuading people to take advantage of it. After all, the 501(c)(3) tax code does not mention the arts; most nonprofit arts organizations receive nonprofit status through the education designation.
“The best educators do not use education as a tool to gain power, nor do they rely upon memorization of facts as their mode of teaching.iv Instead, they set up scenarios in which students make the connections and discoveries.v Since information is readily available to people, the educator’s role is to help learners develop how to discover, analyze, and synthesize information for themselves.”
“Not only does education allow an arts organization to engage with its community as never before, but it also enables an arts organization to serve the community in a new way. We can shift the effort and resources spent persuading potential audience members to attend, transforming that energy into something more valuable. The move from promotion to education allows arts organizations to provide value to the community, even before a purchase occurs.”
“Some arts organizations already implement this with their patrons (who have purchased tickets) but do little for those who lack arts education or experience. The goal is not to create art critics, but to help our communities to discover for themselves what they take from the arts experience.”
The Engagement Edge
So, the four Ps are out, and the four Es are in, so to speak. That is the basis for The Engagement Edge. It’s a process for allowing entire nonprofit arts organizations to reach those who are underserved or not served at all. It’s a way to have maximum impact. And it is a way for the nonprofit arts to break some of the chains of capitalism that challenge the basic premise of why the nonprofit arts exist. For those nonprofits who embrace The Engagement Edge, we expect to see a very promising future.
Released in Sept., How to Market the Arts: A Practical Approach for the 21st Century is available from Oxford University Press.
