In the know

Heather Maitland advises you to think about what you want to know – it may be that someone already knows the answer

The point of marketing planning is to make informed decisions about what will get your organisation from where it is now to where it wants to go. So where can you get the information to support those decisions?

Wait before you reach for that questionnaire, because someone has probably done the work for you. There is such a lot of readily available information about audiences (by audiences, I mean readers, visitors, participants – whoever it is you want to engage with). The abundance of information has its down side. If you are not to drown in paper, you need to decide in advance what you need to know, why you want to know it and what you will do with the information.

Your shopping list will include two sorts of information: about organisations and audiences similar enough to yours for you to make parallels; and about the wider communities your organisation seeks to serve.

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Customer experience

Heather Maitland warns about making assumptions when researching your customers’ experience

Researching how satisfied people are with the experience your organisation offers is not straightforward. It is all too easy to research the things that your colleagues think are important rather than what really matters to your customers.

Ellen Garbarino and Mark Thompson analysed the experiences of audiences at an off-Broadway repertory theatre to try and identify the factors that create customer satisfaction and loyalty.

They concluded that, for frequent attenders, satisfaction with the quality of the acting was the main factor driving trust and the preference for familiar actors drove commitment. The quality of the physical facilities affected their satisfaction but not their levels of trust, commitment or their future intention to return.

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Trainspotters and Trendsetters

Heather Maitland considers the nature of audiences for unfamiliar work by unfamiliar artists

I can’t think of many arts organisations that don’t want to stretch their audiences and their staff by programming outside their comfort zone. That means we are all dependent on the visitors, participants and audiences who are willing to follow us into unknown territory.


At its annual conference in May, Audiences Central invited speakers and participants to explore the world of trainspotters and trendsetters. We defined trainspotters as those consistently interested in a particular type of arts activity that most people aren’t and trendsetters as those who consistently take risks with unfamiliar and untested artists activities in a way that most people don’t. So who are they and what are they like?


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Profiling on-line ticket buyers

Each year since 2001, ts.com has sent out email questionnaires to people who purchased tickets from client organisations who want to participate in the research. In 2004, we joined forces to explore in more detail customers’ attitudes to the online purchasing process, ecommerce and new technology. 18 organisations participated in the project resulting in 6,931 responses to the email survey and a useful profile of on-line customers.

Does online purchasing attract new audiences?

5% of all respondents to the email questionnaire were first time attenders at the relevant organisation. But if you have undertaken self-completion questionnaire research in your organisation, you will have noticed that certain types of customer are more likely to respond: in particular, they tend to be older and to be more frequent purchasers. The Swan Theatre in High Wycombe and Newbury Racecourse volunteered to help us test if this was true for email questionnaires. During the two week research period, all their online customers were asked to respond to a short questionnaire at the end of the ticket buying process. They also asked three core questions of their telephone and counter customers. In both venues, this showed that new and infrequent customers were significantly under-represented among respondents to the email questionnaire.

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Heather Maitland

published by the Arts Marketing Association 2000

Is it time to acknowledge that the accepted notions about marketing new work simply don’t get results? Time to throw them out and think of something that does?

We’ve been trying to develop audiences for new work for years now but numbers still don’t meet expectations. And marketers still feel under unbearable pressure to achieve the impossible. So what are we doing wrong?

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