10 lessons from week one pre-Work
On Monday November 2nd, we gathered for our first Q&A sessions to dive deeper into the week 1 prework. During this session, we did a quick review of key pages from the prework and also engaged in a discussion around participants’ questions on the materials. Below we’ve summarized the highlights from our sessions. (Watch Recording of Session 2 at the end of the page)
Building an emotional connection with consumers is the most powerful lever to build loyalty. Our large-scale survey of consumers showed that emotional differentiation has the highest impact on consumers’ loyalty to a brand. So when you think about that outer ring of customers who are not yet loyal to your organization, our survey data tells us that building an emotional connection with them is what can drive them to your organization at this time.
Like the broader consumer population, arts audiences also reward emotional connection. The two greatest levers arts organizations can pull to build an emotional connection with their audiences are meeting audience members’ motivation to attend and making them feel welcome. Interestingly, meeting audiences’ motivations for attendance are more impactful in building loyalty than all performance elements (e.g., staging, composer, performers) combined.
Shared values achieve a more intense bond in the arts. Most arts marketing typically focuses on performance benefits (e.g., famous artist, well-reviewed, popular show). One level higher than that is to talk about the emotional benefit of the art itself. For example, art provides an escape from your every day life. The highest level is connecting to beliefs. Let’s use Ballet Austin as an example. They learned through their Wallace grant about the emotional connections their audiences have – at the social, kinesthetic levels. So, they combined those into a single message: “be well” and provide content under that umbrella. They offer videos about health, exercise and mental wellness, all aligned under categories of wellness. Simply aligning your work under a single emotional umbrella will have impact on your audience loyalty.
Shared values have five key characteristics. They are emotional, higher order (meaning, they sit above the category of art), relevant, credible, and differentiated. We’ll be digging more into each of these over the next few weeks.
High loyalty brands are more likely to own shared values. Your emotional connection power grows with higher order attributes. Highest loyalty brands are about three times more likely to “own” shared values than average brands.
Thirty-three percent of your audiences love you for you – your art is their shared value. What that means is that for that segment of your audience whose primary motivation for attendance is pursuing their passion or seeing art performed at the highest level, the functional is inherently emotional. They are people who say ‘[opera] is part of who I am.” They appreciate the finer functional differences in the art. But these aren’t typically the ones where we need to worry about their loyalty.
For the remaining two-thirds of your audiences, the art form requires translation to what they value most. These people’s motivations to attend sit further away from what you are putting on stage. However, these segments cannot be ignored - they are critical to the future of the industry. Arts organizations need to use the same lever used by consumer brands to drive their loyalty – they need to appeal to shared values. To get these not yet “Loyals” to love your organization, you need to help them live their values.
It is more effective to focus on one shared value, rather than multiple. That said, shared values can be broad enough to encompass a lot of things that your organization cares about. Take Ballet Austin’s “Be Well” value. Under this umbrella of “Be Well”, they can focus on physical health, mental health, intellectual health, and more. The value can provide a wide umbrella of ways to demonstrate it, but you don’t want to be caught where people don’t know what you stand for.
When defining your shared value, use your organization’s long-standing values, beliefs, and mission as the starting point. If you don’t start with what your organization stands for, you will never be perceived as authentic. Understanding your audiences’ values is important, but the foundation of your shared values should start with your organization.
Shared values give you an opportunity to broaden your appeal. By selecting a higher order shared value, you are actually able to appeal to a broader segment of people. For the 66% or audiences who aren’t necessarily there for the performance, shared values offer a stronger attraction and can keep them coming back.
