We sell, but we don't. A very interesting and quite true tangle. If you're bottom line is the ticket you're done for, and yet you're done for without the ticket.... And what's the answer?

As things get scarier (we deal primarily with drama teachers who are losing their jobs left right and centre) we're trying to focus on who we are 'beyond' being a bookstore. We sell scripts. Great. But what are we beyond that. I think if we can push forward with that in mind, rather than the dollars and cents, we'll see the other side. That's the theory. :)

"Slings & Arrows" is my personal DVD addiction! Of course, I'm Canadian, and so have a certain bias, but its writers' art is terrific and with both comedy and profundity they ask about the Canadian version of everything Andrew mentions here. And in series 3, they ask what happens when artists and their directors cannot handle both their ongoing and various needs to transform personally and also do their work.
If arts management today means bundling audience perks, smart packaging, psychological analysis, trend charts, streetscape flows, seeking "what would Google do", managing theatre shop products, designing tshirts and toys, so be it. If our audiences are so starved of the arts they can't absorb them any longer unless they're massaged, then we've got a crisis of education -not of management. But the second that business and marketing work slides under the theatre's closed doors and dark rehearsal rooms, then the artists are failed. If a manager believes that, beyond his own job to sell tickets, that it is also the job of the art itself and its artists to market, sell, entertain, and market on stage, and if artists move to obey, then arts managers have actually left the world of art management. I think the phrase is-'sold out'. Managers would be better to do what Paul Gross as the artistic director in "Slings & Arrows" did -manage a company in Montreal called "Theatre sans Argent" (without money).

The companion question that should also be mined by arts groups is "Why DO people Buy". The field of Neuromarketing/Neuroscience marketing should be built in to the marketing message and branding of each arts company.

As artists we work often to create on the level of the unmitigated unconscious and subconscious, we know how to do that. Why not create a (repeatable/memorable) tag line and defining statement for the company that is as deep reaching . I teach my entrepreneurial clients how to capture the essence of their services in a process based on my theater character development. It becomes the gift that keeps on giving because people love to repeat it and be the influential who can tell you where you can get the solution you are looking for.

A hint as to why people buy? The "What's in it for me?" It has very much to do with seeking redemption. What do YOU save people from?

The company that gets behind that one will thrive.

I think the most problematic legacy system we're dealing with is an arts communication model that's stuck in the mid 20th century.

Old-model arts marketing adheres to a formula that says: boast about yourself as broadly as your budget allows and hope you hit enough people who care. It was a formula that worked well, of course, when the marketplace was full of arts consumers who were self-motivated enough to respond.

But boasting alone doesn't work on under-motivated arts consumers in an intensely competitive environment. As you and Doug both mention, at some point you have to tell these consumers why they should choose you over the alternatives – what’s in it for them - and juicy quotes from The New York Times simply don't do that.

Doug mentions Barack Obama in his post, who said repeatedly throughout his campaign, "This is not about me; this is about you." Maybe we need to stop talking about ourselves for a while and start talking about how our products satisfy the needs and desires of our various target audiences.

Great points, particularly as I make my way through the fantastic Canadian series "Slings and Arrows" (about the travails of a theatre company similar to the Stratford Festival). You'll laugh, you'll cry, you'll wish you had more big donors.

I guess the answer to this question could be as complicated as some of the calculus needed to figure out the problems in the first place, but given the challenge of these multiple audiences, how often can an organization really step back and evaluate whom they serve, whom they want to serve, and how they serve them?

Season 2 (the Macbeth series) hits this pretty hard ;)