Selling The Arts

"Crisis in the Arts: The Marketing Response" by Joanne Scheff and Philip Kotler, in California Management Review (Fall 1996), Univ. of California, S549 Haas School of Business #1900, Berkeley, Calif. 94720–1900.

For nonprofit performing arts organizations, the bright lights have dimmed. Corporations, foundations, and government agencies have become more tight-fisted, and attendance at plays, concerts, and dance performances has stopped growing. Scheff and Kotler, who teach at Northwestern University’s Kellogg Graduate School of Management, have some advice for the managers of arts organizations: learn to market the "product" better.

Such skills weren’t needed in the golden era that began in the mid-1960s. Professional orchestras increased in number from 58 in 1965 to more than 1,000 recently; professional regional theater companies went from 12 to more than 400; dance companies, from 37 to 250, opera companies, from 27 to more than 110. Ticket sales (adjusted for inflation) jumped 50 percent between 1977 and 1987. By that year, Americans were spending more on tickets to concerts and other arts performances than on tickets to sports events. And foundations and corporations were contributing vast sums ($500 million in 1990).

But that era is gone, Scheff and Kotler say. Audiences are no longer expanding, and in many cases are shrinking. Nearly half of all the regional theaters in the country are operating in the red. "Increasingly, funders— especially government agencies and foundations—are restricting their grants for specific purposes and less funding is available for general operating support. Corporate support is becoming more commercial than philanthropic, and conditioned on arts organizations becoming leaner, more business-oriented, and able to meet the corporation’s own marketing objectives."

To survive and thrive, Scheff and Kotler say, arts organizations need to build audiences by mounting "full-fledged campaigns that include direct mail, telemarketing, welldesigned, high-quality brochures, advertising, and special offers designed to attract and retain patrons." Surveys indicate "that many more people are interested in attending the performing arts than currently do so." It will take creative marketing to get them into the theater or concert hall. That may mean, for example, selling tickets in grocery stores or workplaces. The Columbus (Georgia) Symphony enjoyed a 35 percent increase in ticket sales after putting a humorous ad on local television showing that it was okay for concert-goers to dress down.

Many people in the arts have traditionally looked on marketing with disdain, but that attitude, the authors say, is a luxury that arts organizations can no longer afford.