'Theatres get their marketing wrong': Groningen PhD research tries to reinvent wheel

A wheel cannot be invented often enough. After all, someday something truly new will emerge. In marketing land, this is pretty much the constitution. That is why it is so moving to see how at the University of Groningen, a young researcher has presented a wheel on arts marketing that is, quite expectedly, a lot rounder than the already bullet-round wheels invented in that field. We have not read the entire study at this time, and must confine ourselves to the post on Marketing Online, but oh,oh, what far-reaching conclusions Kim Joostens draws in the doctoral research 'Art & Customer in the Dutch performing arts'.

Theatres need to know better who their audience is, do more audience marketing:

'Most of the energy goes into posters, flyers and advertisements and, if a hall is not likely to be full, another last-minute action by mail. There is absolutely no coherence. They try to reach all target groups, they don't take time to study their audience. That form of art marketing needs to be developed much more'

Part of the 200 million now being cut from the arts should be put into training better marketers, according to the PhD student. Halls should also leave performances longer and the offer should be better tailored. All wonderful, but also already said, thought of and applied countless times, such as in the big cities, where theatres also generally do very well.

The problem is of course in the region, where every village with more than 20,000 inhabitants has a theatre with 800 seats. And however much Kim Joostens would like to: it is the town councils, aldermen and theatre managements in those cores that cannot, will not and are not allowed to cooperate. Longer series, another thing, are not allowed by the subsidiser, who demands a wide reach plus ditto attendance of as many theatres as possible.

It is too often shouted these days that it is all a matter of marketing, and we cannot blame an aspiring marketer for repeating that cry either. It just doesn't make sense. You cannot improve a structurally bad market with marketing. You really need politics for that. Who, for instance, would decide not to reduce supply, as is the case now, but who would limit the number of take-up spots, so that they can be played better. This has been published before.