“Arts marketing is an integrated management process which sees mutually satisfying exchange relationships with customers as the route to achieving organisational and artistic objectives” (Hill, 2003, p.1). This definition highlights that the essential part of arts marketing is relationships; relationships between the different departments of the organisation to ensure that the company shares the same ideas of the work they’re creating and the audiences they want to attract, and the relationship between the organisation and their audience, not just in the sense of getting bums on seats but of understanding who they are and interests them to the work you’re creating. What this highlights is that the role of arts marketing is “to match the artist’s creations and interpretations with an appropriate audience” (Mokwa, 1980, p.15). In order to do this effectively, arts marketing is very much a process, as “creative marketing is constantly learning about what it is doing, in order to do it better throughout the scope of an organisation’s activities” (Hill, 2003, p.2). All this is done with the audience as central, a point Jude Kelly, former Artistic Director of the West Yorkshire Playhouse makes, “arts marketing is about loving people. You have a sense that you’ve got something that matters and you want them to have it too” (Hill, 2003, p. 7).

Arts marketing has evolved greatly over the years, traditionally marketing was very much a separate department in an organisation which did not focus on the customers at all. It was not until the 1970s that arts marketing in the U.K really began to focus on the audience. This was through subscription based marketing, which hoped “to convert their single-ticket buyers into loyal regular patrons” (Hill, 2003, p.4), a central part of this was to offer audiences discount tickets. While this method did help bring the audiences in to more than one production of the companies, it did not help create an understanding of who their audience was.

By the 1980’s the focus became directed to the use of computers in marketing departments and database marketing. This allowed companies to become more focused on their audiences as they could now analyse their customer records and began to “realise the possibilities of understanding their audiences differently” (Hill, 2003, p.5), for example postcode profiling allowed companies to create a demographic on the audiences they were attracting and thus allowed companies to begin to understand who their target audience was.

However, the biggest step of arts marketing came with the arrival of the integrated computerised ticketing system, part of this was giving audiences the possibility to buy tickets online. The tools this provided arts marketers with “a comprehensive single source of data which relates ticket sales immediately to customer databases. As a result, the whole organisation can achieve an integrated view of the customer which feeds into accounting, marketing, operations and development”. This allowed companies to really gain an understanding of their audiences and create a concrete image of who their target audience is. Techniques like “segmentation, which involves aiming at particular sections of the market…or tracking individual customers in order to understand their needs better, are now part of the arts marketer’s toolbox” (Hill, 2003, p.5).

This evolution expresses how arts marketing has become more and more centred about the customer, in discovering who they are, what attracts them to the work and ways in which a company can use this information to ensure audiences keep returning to their shows.

As a newly formed company, this highlights to us the importance of knowing and understanding our audience. As our work progresses in the next coming weeks, our next step is to create an understanding of the different audiences and consider who is our target audience and what will be the most effective way to reach them and begin to implement this.

Works Cited

Hill, Liz, O’Sullivan, Catherine, O’Sullivan, Terry (2003) Creative Arts Marketing, Oxford: Butterworth.

Mokwa, M.P., Dawson, W.M. and Prieve, E.A (1980) Marketing the Arts, New York: Praeger