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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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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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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Raspberry & Peaches

How do you signal to the readers of your season brochure that this event is seriously weird? You want to encourage them to take risks but you’d rather not have half the audience stomping out in a huff. Peaches and cream for these copywriters who have been working towards some solutions.

Peaches and Cream…

You can be up front – this gig from Edinburgh’s independent music festival Planet Pop may be harmful to your health …
Only for the true believers … Huckleberry’s blaring Hammond organ, fuzzed-up guitars and heavyweight rhythm section go straight for the heart, blowing your eardrums along the way.

Or, like the Barbican, you can issue an irresistible challenge to your audience:

Feeling pretty confident about contemporary dance? Know your way around? Bring it on. It’s time to leave the comfort zone. i said i shatters everything you ever thought about dance and dancers. Bizarre, breathtaking and as full-on as you can get: expect to go home and rest afterwards…

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Raspberry & Peaches

Why do we seem to find it so difficult to persuade people to experience the arts? Could it be that we are not talking to people in the right way? Almost all audience members need straightforward answers to three straightforward questions: What is it about? What is it like? How am I going to feel when I experience it? In a bid to get us all communicating appropriately, JAM brings you a range of peaches to aim for and raspberries to avoid.

A Big Raspberry to…

The dance festival that consistently writes copy that goes straight over most people’s heads – including those who like contemporary dance:

His performances explore movement inspired by how the body is regarded as both form and content in a live performance. [This] is a solo work which searches for the space where the perception of oneself as object collides with the wish to retain control…

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Raspberry & Peaches

Why do we seem to find it so difficult to persuade people to experience the arts? Could it be that we are not talking to people in the right way? Almost all audience members need straightforward answers to three straightforward questions: What is it about? What is it like? How am I going to feel when I experience it? In a bid to get us all communicating appropriately, JAM brings you a range of PEACHES to aim for and RASPBERRIES to avoid.

A Big Raspberry to…

The three day contemporary music festival taking place in March in three different towns which refuses to give potential audience members a single word of description of any of the pieces, just the composer and title. We need to tell people what the music will be like, so another raspberry to the leaflet for Jocelyn Pook, which, despite offering in very tiny print (and sideways) a sampler CD, restricts itself to biographical information and name dropping like this…

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