add significant monetary value to box office intake in the immediate future.
Similarly, in
‘inreach’ projects building-based institutions of culture may go out and try to bring people to their own buildings. The other type of audience development, Extended Marketing, by contrast, focuses on people with high attendance potential but who are not yet in the customer group.
It is largely based on
the basics of arts marketing, arousing the latent interest in the arts of potential audiences and persuading them to come to performances whilst improving aspects of the arts which deter their attendance.
Tactics used include arts marketing techniques such as special discounts.
The third version of audience development, Taste Cultivation, refers to efforts to cultivate the taste of the existing audience. of specific art forms.
It seeks to introduce different art genres and forms to attenders
It therefore differs from the previous versions in offering different
products but to the same individuals.
For example, a project may encourage attenders of
classical music concerts to experience the visual arts or to experiment with contemporary music. Such efforts are made increasingly possible by co-operation between arts organisations which swap their customer databases, and helped particularly by the work of the marketing agencies which exist in most regions in Britain.
The target pool of consumers is therefore for the most
part the existing one, but by offering products that they do not currently consume this strategy aims to expand the arts attendance market as a whole.
This version of audience development
should result in an increase in the total number of attendance/visits by cultural consumers, but not necessarily in an increase in the absolute number of arts attenders.
Thus it may provide
financial rewards, but very often it is to achieve the organisation’s artistic desire to deliver their works to as many people as possible. The fourth definition of the term, Audience Education, is similar to Taste Cultivation in that it mainly targets the existing audience, but it tries to enhance the understanding and enjoyment of the arts which existing attenders currently consume.
If Cultural Inclusion and Extended
Marketing are concerned with the quantitative aspect of arts attendance, this is more about the quality of the audience’s experience.
On its own this does not lead directly to a market
expansion, but it can be expected that with enriched experience the core audience will return to the arts events more frequently.
Examples include pre- or post-performance talks which aim to
help the audience to have a better understanding of the event or a different perspective from which to appreciate the performance.
Such a version of audience development is very similar
to life-long learning, an area that has also been expanding in recent years. The difference which can be artificially made for the sake of conceptual distinction between life-long education
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