In the 60s direct marketing expert Ed Mayer popularized the 40-40-20 rule. He claimed 40% of a mailpiece’s success depended on the list, 40% depended on the offer and 20% depended on other factors including design.
You can develop your own set of numbers by a simple method. Continue reading
Over the last two years virtually all orchestras have cut spending to balance the budget. In many cases they’ve used across-the-board reductions. This can have the negative effect of further reducing ticket revenues by more than the savings in marketing. There’s a smarter way to decide how large the marketing budget should be.
Twitter and Facebook get the headlines. InstantEncore may be more important for orchestra marketers.
I’m not saying to forgo Twitter or Facebook. Each of them is useful for orchestras. Indeed, InstantEncore makes it easier to use those sites and others effectively and efficiently.
Recently I talked with Margo Drakos, the visionary Chief Operating Officer of InstantEncore, about their services as well as the conversation media landscape. This week Margo leads a Marketing Groups 3-8 session on social media with Vince Ford of the New York Philharmonic at the League of American Orchestras Conference. Continue reading
Click on image for pdf file
I’ve put together a diagram of the social technology landscape designed with orchestras in mind. If you work at an orchestra or other performing arts group, leave your name and address below and I’ll send you a poster free of charge as long as my stock lasts. Or click on the image to get an Adobe Acrobat pdf file.
Our audiences are at the center of conversation media. Not us or our brand. We can join in the maelstrom of activity. Or not. The activity of the social space swirls around us in any case. Continue reading
[This was originally posted at the League of American Orchestra's microsite, R/Evolution, before the June 2010 League Conference in Atlanta]
Everything’s fine in classical music. Let’s celebrate today’s terrific musicians, the best ever.
Professional music-making isn’t a cushioned ride. But should it be? Let’s enjoy instead a wild, passionate, interesting and sometimes painful journey. And end the hand-wringing. Continue reading
In previous posts I identified two ways in which orchestra marketing is unusually challenging. First, the discipline involves a wide range of functions. Second, the job demands managing a year-long subscription campaign at the same time it requires numerous in-and-out promotions for individual concerts.
The last reason I’ll identify is related to the first. The different functions in the marketing role straddle three different personality types or work styles. Continue reading
Preliminary Design
Charlene Li sent me an advance copy of Open Leadership: How Social Technology Can Transform the Way You Lead, to be released May 24. Thank you, Charlene. In 2008 Li co-authored Groundswell, which illustrates the nature and power of the social space. Further, Groundswell shows us how to define our strategy by figuring out the relationship we desire with customers rather than chasing a technology. Last month I summarized 
its meaning for orchestras. Open Leadership moves beyond that base of knowledge by writing about the intersection of organization behavior and social media.
Li writes that “leaders must let go to gain more.” She backs all her directives, which I’ve restated here for orchestras, with stories from business and the social landscape.
Orchestra marketing demands two sets of complex skills related to the marketing cycle. We manage a series of seasonal promotions. And we manage an annual campaign. Simultaneously.
Think of the seasonal aisles in your local drug store. At this time they’re full of summer items. In July you’ll see back-to-school merchandise. Halloween follows. The day after Halloween it’s Christmas. And the year will progress through Super Bowl, Valentine’s and Easter. Continue reading
When I entered orchestra marketing I thought turning sales results upward would be easy. After all, I’d succeeded over many years in many businesses. And in that work and in my schooling I’d benefited from wonderful mentors. Surely the practice of marketing orchestras would be sleepy in comparison to packaged goods.
I found instead that the pace doubled. In this series of posts I’ll share three things that make our task challenging. Continue reading
Since the 2008 crash virtually every orchestra has reduced its marketing expenses by cutting back advertising, mailings or people. Sadly, that also cuts sales. But there are other ways to save. You can reduce your agency’s time and billings through the disciplined use of creative briefs. Better briefs also save your time as an orchestra marketer by improving communication and avoiding wasted efforts. And good briefs help your marketing initiatives succeed.
Click for pdf
A creative or design brief translates your marketing plan into the tactics needed for an individual project. You sketch out the objectives, target segment, desired response, message, budget, copy, tone and perhaps even the format and graphics to use. Then you and your agency or designer rework it. Only with agreement on this vision do they start to work. I’ve attached a starting point for such a creative brief in Adobe Acrobat and in Word. Continue reading
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The Dalai Lama wrote me. He called me a dear friend.
His letter is part of a classic direct mail package without a brochure on behalf of the International Campaign for Tibet. It turns out the Dalai Lama’s letter doesn’t have much of a call to action. That’s OK; he has other wonderful qualities.
Let’s see what we can learn from the whole package. After all, as orchestra marketers we frequently send direct mail packages with or without a brochure.
The mailing consists of six parts:
Today I heard a panel of three industry experts discuss the future of interactive marketing.* At that event several audience questions compared interactive marketing to traditional marketing. The traditional marketing they defined lives only in a Second Life. It lives only in our minds.
Marketers typically feel we live in a tug of war. On one side we employ the tools we think are working based on past testing, which always seem to be losing efficacy. On the other we experiment with promising technologies. If you’re uncomfortable with chaos go into accounting.
Steve Cook
In 2009 the Dallas Symphony Orchestra’s ticket revenue hit $11 million, eclipsing its previous all-time high of 2008. Over the four years of Steve Cook’s work there as Chief Marketing and Entertainment Officer total sales increased by 33%.
I asked Steve how he did it in this terrible economy so we could learn from his successes.
A few days ago I finished reading Charlene Li’s and Josh Bernoff’s terrific Groundswell: Winning in a World Transformed by Social Technologies, published by Harvard Business Press in 2008. That’s old by social media standards, isn’t it? Yet Groundswell’s insights remain fresh and bold.
I plead guilty. I’m enamored of blogs, ratings and reviews, forums, Twitter and the tools it has spawned, Facebook, LinkedIn, RSS, YouTube and wikis. Yet what I found compelling were three ideas that apply across all of social media.
Pentagram of Photographs
Market research tells us that concert audiences connect and identify with orchestra musicians, guest artists and conductors. So selecting and cropping photos professionally for ads and brochures sells tickets. Here are five considerations to apply when reviewing musician images.
The logo of The Learning Channel's What Not to Wear (US version)*
In the last 24 hours I’ve talked to one mid-sized orchestra which just cut four positions. Another has only a part-time marketer. Meanwhile marketers are bombarded with “shoulds” from the board, president, audience members, fellow marketers, vendors and friends. We should know the ROI of every initiative we field. Our content on the Web, Facebook, Twitter and email isn’t fresh and exciting enough. Have we conducted exhaustive market research on all our important issues? We need a customer loyalty program. We should reach out to those outside the classical music world.
© David Seymour | Dreamstime.com
No, we shouldn’t. We can’t do it all. Let’s recognize that.
We define our strategy—our plan for doing—based on the opportunities we see and the time and money we have. We then must not do other things. Continue reading
I assembled a list of ten musicians who market themselves beautifully. I realized in the process how this became a list of great musicians regardless of marketing.
Photo by Carol Highsmith*
When I sat down with Phil Miller a few days ago I expected to talk about the future of the telephone in orchestra marketing. Phil is President of DCM, which provides telemarketing, telefundraising and inbound sales services to orchestras, theaters, operas and museums. Instead he opened my mind to today’s truth.
Phil Miller
“Imagine a world without phones—just social media like Facebook and Twitter—and email. Then one day someone discovers the phone. OMG! And they realize they can talk to each other. They see how and what they can communicate that way.
Forty years ago the Cincinnati Symphony and Decca Records marketed Webern’s Passacaglia, Mennin’s Canto, William Schuman’s Tripych and the Dallapiccola Variations as orchestral showpieces. And the orchestra performed them as showpieces, too, with that most mainstream of conductors, Max Rudolf. You can hear the spectacular performance of the Webern on YouTube. There’s always a beautiful line, movement and a sense of drama.
Of course Rudolf was no ordinary conductor. The Haydn, Schubert, Weber and Bruckner I heard him lead in my high school years particularly stand out in my memory.
In the name of marketing orchestras today rarely program thorny works from the first half of the twentieth century. Much of the new music performed today is tonal and accessible—and also empty. If that’s where marketing leads, may I go into another profession.
“The Webern Passacaglia won’t sell tickets,” I and others might say. When programmed I wouldn’t headline Webern in the newspaper listing. Nor would I recommend a program consisting only of these four pieces. Yet our audiences need challenges. They came to classical music because it demands more attention than other music, not less. Perhaps the occasional Webern—and Varese, Lutoslawski, Stockhausen and countless others rarely played today—actually would sell tickets globally over the long run.
Every year one or two orchestras make news by closing their doors. They cancel the rest of the season. There’s no money for creditors. Tickets for future concerts become worthless. It’s rare that it’s an orderly process.
May that never happen again.
Yet a practice by some orchestras makes this more likely. Those orchestras use the cash receipts for next year’s subscriptions to fund this year’s operations.
Every day I drive by the building from which “Sir” Allen Stanford bilked investors by issuing phony bank CDs. Yet it’s Bernie Madoff that I find more intriguing. Madoff ran his Ponzi scheme for years. Once started there was no exit, as current deposits covered past, imaginary earnings.
In a recent Broadway revival of a 1916 play, The Voysey Inheritance, the patriarch of a family business runs a Ponzi scheme on a small scale. His son discovers the fraud, then tries for years to manage the business out of it—unsuccessfully. He’s enmeshed in the fraud which he dedicates his career towards redressing. Continue reading
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