Arts Marketing - Dan Ramsden on arts marketing

"tell us about a recent campaign that you especially liked."

There was something about the whole conversation that had, so far, left me cold and unengaged. It was like I was being interviewed via satellite and the delay between the motion of the questioner’s mouth and the sound that i heard was robbing the words of their meaning. and this question was the point that did for me.

Marketers used to speak of campaigns. Just like the Generals of the First World War they would hatch plans, draw battle lines and hope to stage an assault. To overcome. For a while it seems marketers sought to emulate them. And this might seem a bit of stretch but language is powerful and wrought with meaning and if you apply such a word to what you do then you must ask yourself why. Why? Because if we are to see marketing as being comprised of campaigns then what are we? At war? Are we marauders or liberators? And how can we turn this use of language to our advantage, how can we marshal the metaphor.

Marketing is not a weapon. It is a strength. I'm sometimes left with the impression that artists view marketing as a dirty word. Again thinking of First World War generals "crevice is a dirty word, marketing isn't." [paraphrase BlackAdder Goes Forth, General Hospital] But you can see how artists, indeed a public in general come to fear, resent and reject marketing if we frame it in terms of campaigns, conquest.

Marketing is about the spread of ideas, about the exposition of a viewpoint and at worst the cajoling of perspective. Marketing is really about affording people empathy, giving them an insight into someone’s passion about a product or service. Its about communicating the vision of an artist, about starting a dialogue that will be solidified in the consumption of the art work. It’s communication.

Communication succeeds when there are rules, shared understandings - when interlocutors work together. Terms like Relationship marketing, and permission marketing may have been coined just to sell books - or they may represent a genuine hunt for a new language to talk about what we do. When you think about it even branding sounds a little brutal. But in a world where your marketing is only an unsubscribe link away from banishable, a click away from deletable, or a look away from forgettable perhaps its time we reshaped our outlook and our language to what we do.

Let's reframe our activity to more fully communicate the respect we have for our audiences, for the people who participate in the dialogues we begin and the ones that they find compelling. Let's give ourselves a chance to be proud of the work we do. Marketing is not a single activity – its an approach that focuses on an idea and a set of people and seeks to communicate that idea and develop desire in the people. Its about building harmony between a need and the fulfilment of it. Its engineering fulfilment.

Arts marketing needs some new names for what we do - and if I felt anymore convinced of the fact I would surely launch a campaign.

this is a first draft of a section 'a [new] language for arts marketing'

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Over the coming days and weeks I will be concentrating on Audience Development theory and practice.

Audience Development is a special type of marketing; “a planned process which involves building a relationship between an individual and the arts.”1 This chapter is designed to provide a vocabulary and a theoretical basis for describing and considering what it is
practitioners ask people to take part in when they offer them a theatre ticket. Audience development activity is central to the success of arts organisations for a number of reasons. Perhaps most importantly it is one way to ensure long term growth and
sustainability for an artist or arts organisations, both artistically and financially. Secondly, and equally importantly, it directly addresses the issue that artists continually produce ‘new products.’ Art is stimulating, but similarly new art is often unfamiliar,
even challenging. With each new art work arts marketers must convince the audience to come and take a chance.
Traditional new product development models would work from the definition of a market need and the creation of a strategy to meet and exploit this need. Arts products do something similar in that they satisfy a fundamental human need for meaningful communication. Art speaks directly to individuals, it provides deeply personal experiences in social contexts, it cannot be recreated, just revisited, and on every visit it is always different. Traditional marketing will consistently provide us with tools with which to shape our efforts of communicating the power of the arts. However the real
strength lies in the way practitioners adapt these tools. In the dismantling and reassembling of traditional marketing tools and models practitioners can better understand the demands of arts marketing, its priorities and what makes it unique. In so doing they can shape new practices specifically equipped for the arts. To develop such a
practice I believe it is necessary to work from some theoretical assumptions.

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Writing about low-cost online personalisation is a bit like attempting online personalisation – it’s fraught with questions. I’ve got to admit, this is the sixth draft of this article. Without thinking it through I launched into a fairly amusing piece about technology not being magic, and how even Harry Potter couldn’t catch all his golden-stats with a ‘Web 2.0’. It didn’t really do what it was supposed to. Websites and web technologies can be a bit like that. We launch into them and then add lots of ‘cool’ features until our websites completely miss the point, for our users and for us.

User-centred design focuses us on the various elements that make up a ‘user experience.’ Setting out with a clear vision is the best way to minimise costs and meet goals in web design. While a costly ‘evolving’ design process can lead to fantastic end results, you can often get similar results earlier if you start off with a clear vision. Jesse James Garret (www.jjg.net) describes the elements of user experience, Strategy, Scope, Structure, Skeleton and Surface.

Strategy focuses on purpose: What do we want to get out of this site? What do our users want? Do you want to engender loyalty, communicate brand, disseminate information, advertise or generate income? Most likely there’ll be a combination of goals you want to achieve. It might also help to invent persona’s to represent your key users. Segment the users of your site(s) and represent each as a persona describing their attitudes and what other sites and technologies they might use. Throughout the development of your site and services ask yourself, ‘how would Jamie use this? What would Jamie like to see?’

Scope transforms strategy into a list of features. For example if you want to sell tickets, and know that ‘Jamie’ needs a little extra support you could offer a chat support function (see www.phplivesupport.com where for around £150 you can offer live real-time support to your users). Just last year ‘98% of [arts organisations] stated that they now have websites, 76% stated that they felt that their websites failed to meet all of the needs of their audiences.’ These are all missed opportunities. Defining the scope also allows you to say what your site will not do. Have clear reasons why a function is included or not included. Write this reasoning down to help yourself and colleagues understand your strategy and scope.

Structure binds the different requirements together, bringing cohesion to the experience. If you require users to log into your site then when, during their ‘session’, should they do this? If you have different strands of programming or diverse activities how will users find and identify what is relevant to them?

Skeleton makes the structure concrete; it lets you envisage how a user will flow through tasks. Finally the Surface is where everything is brought together visually – it’s what everything will look like.
If you’ve worked through these stages you have a clear idea of what you and your users need. And so you can find technology to match. You may be able to use an open source (free) content management system (CMS) that gives you professional site management capabilities without having to pay for bespoke software (see www.joomla.org/). You will probably want e-mail lists, or SMS lists for different users and segments with reporting capabilities (see www.creativemessaging.co.uk). You may want to develop an online community around your organisation with features like YouTube and Facebook (see www.ning.com/).

Before you implement a new feature try pitching it to your team. If you can speak confidently about a web development and explain the benefits and alternatives then it’s probably a good idea – if you can’t do this then it needs more work. Never find a cool bit of software or technology and look for a problem to solve with it – identify challenges, and then set about designing solutions. Invite your audience and users to tell you what they think.

The single most effective form of online personalisation doesn’t happen online – it’s someone telling a friend face-to-face about their online experiences. This will happen if your site fulfils its purpose and delights them. The second most effective is them forwarding your e-mails or sending a link – always prompt people to do this in all your communications, and even better, include a line asking those people who received it from a friend to sign up for themselves.

Your website should be an extension of your organisation and should look and sound and walk and talk like you do – it should extend your world – and give your audience/customers another place in which to enjoy your company.

a version of this document was originally published in JAM (Journal of Arts Marketing).

Dan Ramsden is Company Manager at Dead Earnest (www.deadearnest.co.uk) and Director of Creative Messaging (www.creativemessaging.co.uk). As well as working hard he enjoys being rather silly, and sometimes plays tennis. He has other sites on the web including www.iamdanramsden.com. He is a taurus - but that couldn't be less important.

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Stories have the felicitous capacity of capturing exactly those elements that formal decision methods leave out. Logic tries to generalise, to strip the decision making from the specific context, to remove it from subjective emotions. Stories capture the context, capture emotions... Stories are important cognitive events, for they encapsulate, into one compact package, information, knowledge, context and emotion."

Don Norman, Things that make us smart

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I am Dan Ramsden, and as I navigated the net I found this page. You should find it too, considering that your search will be easier as I'm giving you the address. http://clive-shepherd.blogspot.com/2007/08/identity-crisis.html or you could just read below, you lazy devils. It is a really useful insight into how you can think about identity and logo's.

Identity crisis

Back in 1997, when I left Epic to go freelance, I decided to set up my own limited company as a vehicle for my consulting work. In doing this, I made some awful mistakes. One was to call this company 'Fastrak Consulting'. Why was this a problem? (1) because nobody can remember the wierd way I decided to spell 'fastrak'; (2) because the URL is so long - http://www.fastrak-consulting.co.uk/ - that people give up half way through typing it to have a breather; (3) because I could have just called it Clive Shepherd Ltd and not try to pretend I'm some global consulting giant. I've lived with this mistake for ten years because I don't even want to think about the number of people I'd have to notify of a change of name and email address (although it would certainly stop the spam).

The second mistake I made was to hire an awful designer to create my logo. I'll admit that, back then, I thought a consulting firm's identity should be quite conservative, but this one would have been dated in 1907. Not only that, but with the web only just showing its face in public, she contrived to use gradations which were not renderable in web safe colours.

Never mind. Ten years on, and having run out of business cards, I decided to ring the changes. I mocked up something which I thought would look a lot nicer, with a view to finding another designer to finish the job. But I liked what I came up with and decided to stick with it. Here it is:

I'm pleased, because the money I saved paid for my copy of Adobe Illustrator in one go. Now I know it's not that clever - a letter 'f' over a gold box - but remember I had to choose just the right 'f', just the right colour gold, just the right angle for the box! Less is often more.

Now I haven't printed my new letterhead and business cards yet, so if you think it's horrible, you'd better tell me now.

Clive, your question is akin to the fearful, "Honey, does this outfit make me look fat?" There is no "right" answer. Visual identity for an indiviual is a very personal choice, and probably one many people are never fully satisfied with. As a designer since the 1980s and a design educator since the 1990s, I could offer some suggestions about your design on the basis of the principles of unity, balance, emphasis, contrast, and continuation, but it might be better to ask some questions. I'll start with one you seem to be asking yourself already: Do you really need a logo? What does the "right 'f'" and the "right colour gold" communicate about you or your consulting business? Why do you feel the "f" is so important? What do you want your clients to remember about you? What will anyone who encounters your logo for the first time learn about you from your "f" and your box? How many different ways (media) will clients encounter your identity? How many different design solutions did you explore before you settled on this one? Did you intend the flowing shape of the "f" to have some meaning? How does it communicate "fast" or "track"? Did you intend the cross-stroke of the "f" to represent the hyphen in your URL, or did you intend the shape of your "f" to combine the shape of both an "f" and a "t", or are those just "happy accidents"? The black and gold contrast nicely against a white background, but did you consider what happens on a dark background (such as the dark blue of your home page header) where the legibility of the "f" becomes compromised? Please let me make a suggestion before you commit ink to paper. Find a college or vocational school near you and contact the chair of the graphic design department and ask for a recommendation of a talented, hungry student who needs more real-world work for his portfolio. Take a look at the student's existing portfolio to be sure the student has a style you're comfortable with. Agree to pay the student something (maybe the student needs some nifty software or some textbooks for next semester) and pay even if you do not use the work. Have a good discussion with the design student about why you need a logo and what it should communicate, NOT what it should look like. If the student is good at design process, he should be able to brainstorm a variety of solutions with you -- starting with pencil roughs -- and you may hit on something that's really "you". Don't be afraid to ask for additional solutions if the first ones aren't on the mark. (Hint: I often ask my students to start with 30 thumbnails, and often ask for another 30 or more). You'll feel warm and fuzzy helping out a promising college student build his portfolio, and will probably find an identity that will stand the test of time. Sorry to go on at length. Hope you found some answers among all the questions. David Lester

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Creative Messaging is a new company specialising in arts marketing. It will offer bulk sms and email marketing for the arts.

On launching the service Dan Ramsden, Company Director said, in a commanding voice so as to inspire confidence:
"We work in the arts
We love the arts
We want more people to see, do and hear things they love
We enjoy building audiences
and dialogues with audiences and customers

We have the technology to help audiences find things they’ll love

We can help you use it too

Come and explore our website a bit

www.creativemessaging.co.uk"

When he was feeling more discursive he added:
Some people will charge a lot of money to do some fairly simple things with SMS. We wont.

If all you want to do is send bulk SMS to your own list you can go to our SMS platform http://sms.creativemessaging.co.uk
Create an account and get going.

If you'd like to find out a bit more about how we can support two way dialogues using SMS, use Shortcodes and keywords to filter and automate responses to messages, forward SMS messages to email, use SMS to initiate calls to and from your box office or sales team then explore the site a bit more or get in touch.

All our messages are sent via UK networks - you manage your own list and your subscribers details are safe and secure.

We will charge you a maximum of 7.5p per message - there is no software to install, all you need is a web browser. You can pay securely online using Paypal or we can invoice you. You can export your details from database software straight into the SMS platform.

It is really easy.

Don't be scared of SMS because of cost or lack of technical expertise. We make it affordable and straight forward.

There is no annual subscription to the service - if you only do 1 campaign per year that's fine - but we'll always be happy to help you find new and effective ways of utilising these technologies.

If you think that the SMS services sound great then what we really love is the EMAIL platform that we have found to offer to artists and arts organisations.

Bulk Email is highly complicated and a fairly saturated market, our platform doesn't offer anything massively different - but it comes from us, a company that knows and cares about the arts, it works and it looks lovely.

Creativemessaging.co.uk will also be a place where I write more specifically about marketing with new technologies - although most content will be shared with this site too.

Dan Ramsden is Director of Creative Messaging and the owner of this site. He is also the owner of a first edition of 'Brave New World' by Aldous Huxley, although this is largely irrelevant.

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Lo·gos (lô'gôs', lŏg'ŏs') n.
In Christianity, in Saint John's Gospel, especially in the prologue (1:1-14), the creative word of God, which is itself God. Also called Word.

Even without the theological hermeneutics marketers are keenly aware of the powerful creative potential of brands, and of their public face, the logo. But brand is much, much more than simply a logo. Brand is the sum of all the associations a person has for your organisation. It is what your organisation is worth to them, it is the value of the "idea" of your company, more than the reality. The business world knows this, ordering the value of the largest companies in the world with reference to the power of the brand. When things go wrong, when the associations are re-formatted, or re-ordered we see an impact on the value of a company. When the Challenger space shuttle exploded in 1986 the stock market reacted by devaluing the companies involved in manufacturing the shuttle (interestingly wiping the most value from the company which manufactured the faulty O-rings blamed for the tragedy, even before the fault had been found, or rumoured). Brand relates to how much we trust a company. Brand is how much we care. Consider whether it would make a difference if we all woke up tomorrow and Apple, Microsoft, BA, HMV, Pepsi, Guiness had all ceased trading, and been replaced by different companies all offering exactly the same products. Would it matter? Imagine all of the players and staff of your favourite sports team suddenly moved to a local rival, where would your alegiance lie? Fewer and fewer transactions in our life are simple. Value is everywhere. People select products not only on features, but also on a rich set of associations. Think of the products you are most passionate about and try and decide if it is just for what they offer "on spec" or is there something more, something behind that, which although not spoken out loud people are aware of.

Its strange but the pervasiveness of brand in our psyche means that as marketers we have a powerful tool that doesn't necessarily have a lot to do with what our organisation does - but is probably more affected by how we do it.

For the next few months the articles will be continuing to focus on constructed meaning. I will develop a metaphor of brand creating a world for your organisation. This is a world that the user/audience/customer can come and live in for a while.

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Those who stress negotiated meaning argue that the meanings of texts are neither completely predetermined nor completely open, but are subject to certain constraints. Some commentators refer to influences on the process of making meaning such as 'a preferred reading' - which may be represented in the text as 'an inscribed reader' or may emerge in 'interpretative communities'. Individual readers may either accept, modify, ignore or reject such preferred readings, according to their experience, attitudes and purposes.

We are all familiar with concepts which urge us to prioritise the user/audience member. User-centred design is hugely popular in digital media projects, web projects and consumer goods. More and more the role of the consumer in the construction of meaning, and value, is coming to be acknowledged and even prioritised. Web 2.0 technologies, and emerging interaction techniques and practices open up the possibilities for communication which is direct and deeply personal to our consumers. But with these possibilities come dangers.

As arts marketers we are often responsbile for constucting, modifying, incubating the expectations of our audiences. There exists a bond of trust between artists, marketers and audiences as each contributes distinct elements to construct the transactions which occur in cultural consumption. A play may only last 60 minutes, but if a person booked their tickets 3 weeks in advance they have had three weeks with an idea that you (the marketer) and they made together - it is unique to them, was constructed with your help, and with the ideas that the artist gave you about what they should expect.

We lay the foundations for individuals to build complex relationships with the organisations we represent. The foundations will be more accessible to some individuals, and similarly more fertile ground for discreet segments. But by thinking in terms of foundations. By understanding that we are building the schemata of relationships, the skeleton, which the attender will apply meaning we fully understand the potential for personalised approaches.

The schemta which we construct begins and ends in brands - which I will talk about in more detail next week as I describe a shift from an acquisition mindset, where we are trying to communicate a simple, monologic message, to a series of unique relationships, as we induce attenders to climb a ladder of trust, commitment and ultimately meaning.

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I believe that the meaning which defines the relationship between the attender (consumer) and the venue is constructed by the attender, in partnership with the marketer. The meaning emerges from the interplay between the text (the brand, marketing and promotional activity) and the desires, beliefs and attitudes of the audience member.

The next few posts will describe the process whereby arts marketers can:

Use the schemata of brand to build interactive relationships with attenders which are highly personalised.

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There are substantial dangers to asking the wrong question at the wrong time, and I'm not just talking about proposing here. Developing audiences is like a courtship, a finely tuned ballet in which stages are involved, stages of trust and engagement. You wouldn't propose on the first date, you might never tell your partner your pin number, some information is dear, but its also valuable. Building the relationships possible to earn this information, and the trust needed to illicit it, is one of the primary roles of arts marketing.

Each arts proposition is essentially a new product launch, and we have limited ways of knowing where best to appeal to find an audience. We need our audiences to tell us, before they know anything about it, whether they are going to enjoy what we have to offer. This is like asking someone a question without being able to tell them why you want the answer, and not being able to ask the question in the first place. It's tough. But there are ways to meet this challenge.

How did you hear about this event?

I once saw this question asked on a questionnaire. It is not, of essence a bad question, and may yield useful intelligence about penetration of varying channels into different segments. It might tell you where to put your limited ad money in the future. The problem with the question though was that it was proceeded by a list of 26 different options. This is truly terrible - but it teaches us a lesson, and highlights a potential tool.

The results for the answer were mixed. There is some evidence to suggest that people interpreted it slightly differently. Some people imagined it meant "How did you first hear about this event" and ticked only one option. Others obviously read it as inquiring about every channel they had been exposed to.

But lets leave alone the issue of false memory and recall inaccuracy and the slightly ambiguous wording. The 26 item list killed this question. It was the first one on the questionnaire, took up an entire page on its own and I think left those being asked it bewildered, strained and tired. Even reading the list was an effort, let alone scanning the memory to try and remember any possible exposure. And this is where we hit upon the useful lesson.

There is a problem with all research, that the act of observation will prejudice the results. This is most serious in longtitudinal studies where we're hoping for impartiality, we want accuracy and don't want what we're doing to throw our results out. But that's when we're just researchers. Researchers are annoyed when if after asking people at the start of a study period if they've heard of the UN, this very question sensitises them to the existence of the UN. Now it becomes difficult to accurately judge when any changes to the UN's PR strategy has had an impact on public perception. But as marketers we're cock-a-hoop at this. Just by asking people a well structured question we can sensitize them to our messages. Don't think of blue. Don't look for something blue in the room in which you're currently sitting. Don't sit up straight. If any of that made you think for just one second of the thing I wasn't even telling you to do, then imagine what we can achieve when we start to think more carefully of what impact we can achieve from even traditionally non-impact marketing techniques such as researching.

We have to know what questions to ask, we want to know what answers we might get, and we need to imagine what else we could achieve in the asking.

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It's probably said too often. And too often "different" is meant as a pejorative. Arts marketing can be different. It can be good and bad. But when we start to think of arts marketing as special, rather than different, and see its challenges and opportunities we begin to develop specific strategies to make it even more successful.

Each month a new article concerning arts marketing theory and practice will appear here. Please subscribe, join, visit, tell your friends, contribute, or find another way to make a difference and be happy.

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