In response to my drone about Wal-Mart pricing yesterday, I was interested to hear of at least one bold experiment in traditional concert pricing. The folks at the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra are radically rethinking the price of their neighborhood concert series for the coming season, hoping to draw a new family crowd. Says this article on the subject:
Starting this fall, SPCO prices at neighborhood venues will drop to $10 and $25, and $5 for children (17-year-olds will qualify, even if they feel insulted)….Orchestra officials think they’re positioning themselves at the front of a national debate on access to the arts. ”What we’ve done is completely contrary to the orthodoxy in our industry,” said Limbacher. Added Coppock, ”It’s not just a bold experiment, but a big step forward in serving the community much more broadly.”
The article goes on to challenge the remaining arts organizations in town to consider the question, as well:
And they will have posed important questions to the rest of the arts community: How does the price of admission affect your attendance? Are you letting seats go empty because you charge more than some of your audience can comfortably pay? And what are you willing to do about it?
Of course, arts managers out there can see one challenge to this bold experiment coming down the turnpike: the math. If a regular pricing structure covers only a portion of the actual cost of the performance (a fact that drives one of my current favorite contribution appeals), certainly a radically reduced price will cover even less. It will be left to contributed income on one side (and perhaps cost-control on the other) to remain solvent. But we’ll assume here that St. Paul has already figured that part out.
Plus, nonprofit organizations aren’t driven by math but by mission…even if they have to answer to math at the end of the fiscal year.
A second interesting element to this challenge is the specific focus on price. As an academic colleague of mine (hi Jennifer) keeps telling me, ”There is actually very little evidence that the majority of consumers believe that cultural experiences are too expensive. Particularly, current audience members are very price insensitive — it takes dramatic increases in prices or extremely high prices to keep them away.” More often, she says, the problem is not price, but the cost/value calculations:
Among non-audience members, the more commonly heard opinion is that cultural experiences are not valued as worth the cost to those individuals, which is a very, very different thing from ticket prices being too high. This could mean that these consumers do not value the arts highly, or that the time cost is too high for them, or that the social cost is too high for them, or the travel cost, or the opportunity cost of giving up one of the hundreds of other things that they could do on a Saturday night.
So, the balance, as always, is between yielding the revenue you can from those audience members that can and will pay a premium, while serving a broader mission by engaging folks with a different cost/value calculation. But all the while, the real game is in building perceived, expected, and remembered value through any means necessary.
SPCO is wise to focus its new pricing on its ‘neighborhood’ concerts, assuming they still charge a premium on their fancy venue shows. But it will be interesting to watch how the cost, the math, and the audience plays out over the coming season.
