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I’ve just had the pleasure – and I mean it – of addressing the
annual conference of the Association of British Orchestras, at the invitation
of Russell Jones, its Director.
It was a weekend conference, including
two concerts – so it really was a treat for my partner and me. It was held
in Birmingham – another highlight was dinner with the Lord Mayor and Lady
Mayoress and the greats of orchestral management.
I am no classical music expert, though
I listen to Classic FM most evenings and even all night, so it is there when I
surface from sleep, ready to waft me back to slumber again. It is also a constant
companion in the car.
This led to some amusement when Giles
Pearman, the Marketing Director of Classic FM, showed (admittedly on an apples
for pears basis) the frequency with which Classic FM is listened too, compared
with the frequency of Kit-Kat consumption.
I remarked that if I ate the latter
as often as I listened to the former I would be a very wide boy!
My subject was applying the disciplines of CRM to marketing
to the many publics that sustain orchestras – audiences, sponsors, business
partners and so on.
I tried to present a balanced approach, but was fascinated
by the debate that was revealed. Orchestras are built from experts – directors,
conductors, musicians. In many ways, they are the epitome of product orientation.
Just like university professors want to research what they
are interested in, so musicians want to play what interests them, whether renaissance,
romantic or modern music.
So while some members of the audience insisted on the importance
of using classic marketing disciplines to bridge the gap that sometimes exists
between orchestras and their publics, others insisted on the right for orchestras
to be innovative, and rejected the idea that conductors and members of the orchestra
should be exposed to the preferences of the audience, and rejected completely
the idea that they should actually spend time together.
However, in the end, a sensible and interesting consensus
emerged. It was based on the idea that modern music does “take things forward”,
but as with many innovations, it takes some time for new works to become accepted,
beyond the inner circle of early adopters, and some new works, like many product
innovations, disappear without race, never to be played again.
However, most orchestra audiences are composed of a range
of attendees, from the most innovative to the most conservative. The more conservative
members will accept innovations from trusted sources, but orchestras could lose
trust if they innovated too quickly, or produced whole seasons with nothing for
the conservative.
So it makes sense to introduce innovations at a steady pace,
and maintain a balanced repertoire rather than as I described it deliberately
producing a proposition designed to alienate all last year’s customers! The
evidence that this seemed to be the case came from an excellent presentation by
Katy Raines, of Dixon Raines, a specialist arts marketing consultancy.
Her research showed the enormously low incidence of customer
loyalty amongst orchestra attendees – regulars are rare and once a year attendance
seemed the norm. This dispelled many myths, such as the idea that orchestras compete
with each other for audiences.
Instead, they compete with other forms of receiving music,
from Classic FM and CDs to works downloaded from the Internet to electronic devices
allowing storage of 10,000 tracks.
Indeed, myths about what audiences – or indeed sponsors
– want seemed to abound. This was associated with an absence of marketing
objective-setting, planning and measurement. This in turn was due to the fact
that most orchestras are under-funded in every respect – whether in terms
of salaries to players or to marketing staff, or in terms of marketing budgets.
This leads to a concentration of budgets on “flogging
the next concert”, and no investment in building the kind of relationship
likely to lead to regular attendance. Worse, it leads to high attrition amongst
orchestral marketing staff, so that learning and experience is lost and consistency
dies.
However, there was a breath of fresh air. I spent some time
talking to marketing people from orchestras in the UK and abroad (particularly
Australia and South Africa) who had broken through the resource barrier. They
did this by using clever, cheap ways to build relationships, allowing them to
create repertoires that their different customer types liked and came to listen
to.
Marketing became cheaper because it was better targeted (at
those likely to come), and within relationships. So the old lessons of marketing
still apply!
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