Arts Marketing Insights

Book excerpt: Audience behavior began to shift dramatically in the mid 1990s. Since then, people have become more spontaneous in purchasing tickets and increasingly prefer selecting specific programs to attend rather than buying a subscription series. Arts attenders also expect more responsive customer service than ever before. Because of these and other factors, many audience development strategies that sustained nonprofit arts organizations in the past are no longer dependable and performing arts marketers face many new challenges in their efforts to build and retain their audiences. Arts organizations must learn how to be relevant to the changing lifestyles, needs, interests, and preferences of their current and potential audiences. Arts Marketing Insights offers managers, board members, professors, and students of arts management the ideas and information they need to market effectively and efficiently to customers today and into the future. In this book, Joanne Scheff Bernstein helps readers to understand performing arts audiences, conduct research, and provide excellent customer service. She demonstrates that arts organizations can benefit by expanding the meaning of "valuable customer" to include single-ticket buyers. She offers guidance on long-range marketing planning and helps readers understand how to leverage the Internet and e-mail as powerful marketing channels. Bernstein presents vivid case studies and examples that illustrate her strategic principles in action from organizations large and small in the United States, Great Britain, Australia, and other countries.