Visual Arts: tapping the potential

Research published by Arts Council England (ACE) last year revealed that there is potential to more than double the market for original art. In Taste Buds: how to cultivate the art market (2004), Morris Hargreaves MacIntyre found that 12% of residents in England were existing buyers of original art but that 15% aspired to buy but had not yet done so. Research also shows that we could almost double the number of gallery and exhibition attenders. The Scottish Arts Council’s research Audiences at Scottish Arts Council Core Funded Visual Arts Organisations indicated that 43% of the population of Scotland said they would consider visiting an art gallery or exhibition but only 57% of these actually attend…

All of this means that in the United Kingdom there are potentially an extra 9 million purchasers of original art and 11 million gallery and exhibition attenders. So how can we tap into this huge potential market for the visual arts?

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Objects or inspiration: should museums focus on marketing the collection or the experience?

Heather Maitland

Here’s how two local museums in the UK introduce themselves to potential visitors:
“Grantham Museum interprets the archaeology and history of this market town and includes Sir Isaac Newton, the Dambusters and Margaret Thatcher.”

“A ‘hands on’ museum for all the family. Full of fun activities for kids, fascinating facts for adults and, for the not so young, a chance to share some cherished memories! Come and discover Rochdale’s past and, perhaps, shape its future”
One focuses on the collection and the other on the experiences visitors can expect.

The reason that someone goes to a museum or art gallery is to experience the art on the wall or the artifacts in the display case – without the objects, there would be no experience. But usually visitors don’t talk about those things when they describe why they enjoyed the exhibition…

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Turning interest into action: reaching the potential visitor

Heather Maitland

Four out of ten people in the UK have visited a museum or gallery in the past 12 months whereas six out of ten have visited a cinema. But 53% of the people who had not been to a museum or gallery give reasons for not attending that imply an underlying commitment to the concept of attending. So more than half of non-visitors are interested in attending – and even more feel positive about museums and galleries with 76% of non-visitors stating that it’s very or fairly important that their local town or city has its own museum or gallery.

So how can we turn this latent interest into action and persuade these potential attenders to visit…

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Open to Persuasion

How can we persuade people to try something different?

How can we persuade people to try something different? Andrew McIntyre argues that the difference between arts attenders and non-attenders is simply motivation. We talk about attenders, intenders, resistors and rejectors and tend to have a picture in our mind of lots of people who would come to our events if only we could remove the barriers that stop them. He suggests that this picture is wrong: these people are not ‘intenders’, because they have no intention of attending. Why? Because we don’t tell them what they will get out of it. If we thought of them as ‘open to persuasion’, then we would communicate much more effectively.

That’s what this column is about. How can we use marketing communications to persuade people that they want to come to our events?

I’ve been talking with Oxford Contemporary Music’s core audience, some of the most enthusiastic arts attenders I have ever met. They go to all sorts of arts events but are particularly committed to seeking out new musical experiences. One even resorts to going into Oxfam shops and buying second-hand cassette tapes at random to see if there is anything unfamiliar that he can follow up. But even these enthusiasts complain that it is difficult to find new music that they might enjoy…

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