Audience Development

Engaging new audiences and deepening connections with existing ones.

Maintaining A Consistent Brand Requires Change

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When things have been going poorly for an organization and they seek a fresh start, (perhaps upon emerging from a national epidemic), the impulse is often to rebrand. However, in a Marketing Week piece, Mark Ritson, argues for a revitalization rather than rebranding.  Ritson argues that even if you feel public perception is so bad there is a need to start over from square one, there is actually quite a bit of solid foundation you would be abandoning in a rebrand. Rebranding – in which we not only attempt to change the … Read more

Show Me What You Love About The Arts Without Using Pictures Of The Arts

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Advisory Board for the Arts sponsored a webinar discussing how Utah Symphony shifted its marketing focus to emphasize emotional factors and shared values.  Karen Freeman, Executive Director of Research at Advisory Board for the Arts, observed that this approach can be effective because “people make choices based on emotional factors but justify it with rational considerations.”  Essentially, how this might manifest is you may choose what car to purchase based on an emotional association but decide it is a good choice based on things like gas mileage, dealer incentives and utility to … Read more

Plan For An Inclusive Post-Covid Cultural Experience

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In mid-December 2020, LaPlaca Cohen and Slover Linett Audience Research released an analysis of the data they collected in the Covid edition of the CultureTrack survey through the lens of race and ethnicity. The three broad categories of change the survey results indicated are: • Becoming more inclusive and community-centered is the most widely desired category and includes greater diversity of voices and faces, greater focus on localness (local artists, local nonprofits, and the local community), more engagement with young people, treating employees fairly, and being friendlier to all kinds of people. … Read more