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Recap: Achieving Audience Growth That Lasts Session 1

January 11 (Replay at end of page)

We were delighted to kick off our Coming Back Stronger Mini Summit on January 11th with our first session, “Achieving Audience Growth That Lasts.” With arts leaders from organizations across the world in attendance, we outlined the key concepts that will lead us through our discussions around building audience loyalty on shared values for the rest of the week. 

The Mini Summit is a condensed version of the 3-week summit we delivered to members in November to present our first signature research study, Coming Back Stronger. The research initiative was born of a simple question: “what is the single thing that can do right now that will most improve our fortunes coming out of the pandemic if we do it?” 

The Risks to Audience Return

We began looking at audiences at the beginning of 2020, when we started our research study about how to attract new, loyal audiences. Then, when the pandemic hit we shifted our focus on support for arts leaders navigating closure (you can watch a recording of this meeting here). Upon returning to our audience research, we realized that the concern had changed: arts organizations were now focused more on engaging their existing loyal subscribers and donors during this challenging time. However, we believe that now is actually a crucial time to focus on your wider audience. 

There are two major risks to audience return post-pandemic that make loyalty so important right now:

  1. Have our casual audiences (who are more easily pulled away during times of financial crisis) developed new, different habits during closure? The question is not whether there will be a drop, but how large it will be.

  2. Have we been able to help our most loyal audiences maintain their passion for us during closure? Will we see a sharp decline in subscriptions as many did in 2009?

 
 

In past examples of full disruptions - from New Orleans tourism after Hurricane Katrina to airline travel post-9/11 - a return to pre-crisis levels took years. Habits, when broken, can take a long time to rebuild. If we are facing a period of 9-18 months before we can return to full capacity, there is ample opportunity for our audiences to break their habits of engaging with us, or to find new habits during this time.

We also cannot take audiences at their word on their likelihood to return. Following the 2008 financial crisis, more than 90% of performing and visual arts attendees said they would attend as much or more at the end of the financial crisis. However, their actual return was quite lower. Data collected in 2011, shows that less than 50% followed through with their intentions. 

 

The Importance of Casual Audiences

One of the big questions of our audience study is where we should focus our energy right now. And as we saw in our research, the answer is quite clear: our “not-yet-loyal” audiences’ return will be a major factor in our success post-pandemic.

When we look at the data around predicted audience return over time, we see that right now during closure our most loyal audiences are the ones filling all of our seats at reduced capacity, which is on average 31% within our membership. Only when we are able to return to a non-socially-distanced structure will we even be able to begin to engage our casual audiences meaningfully. But they are a key portion of our base.

 
 

If we think about the audience makeup of most arts organization’s audiences, about 35-40% are extremely loyal. These people are inclined to come back and also enjoy our digital pandemic offerings. However, it’s that remaining (and majority) portion of our audiences – the more casual attendees - who pose the greatest risk of returning when our doors are finally open again.

That leaves us with the key question we plan to address across the next few weeks:

How should I engage with audiences right now to shorten recovery time post-reopening?

 

Emotional Connection Drives Loyalty

To begin answering this question, we looked at this advertisement from the beauty brand Dove’s 2013 campaign.

Dove’s Real Beauty Sketches explores the gap between how others perceive us and how we perceive ourselves.

 

The Real Beauty Sketches ad goes beyond the product to a deeper emotional value. As one participant of our morning session put it, “it’s attaching the brand to their own inner beauty.” Dove is not alone in this type of marketing: many companies talk about concept rather than product. For instance, it’s hard to recall the last time you learned about the functionality of a shoe from a Nike ad.

How does this tie in with developing audience loyalty? We look to the data for the answer. To understand the key drivers of loyalty, ABA looked at two sources: 

  • ABA’s data of more than 5,000 arts attendees on their preferences, motivations, and attendee experience from our New Loyals survey

  • Data from our sister company, CEB, of more than 10,000 consumers in the US and UK

Let’s first look at the consumer data from CEB (see chart below). The main takeaway is clear: the most significant driver of loyalty for consumer brands is emotional differentiation. It explains 15% of consumer loyalty. (Note: loyalty is a measure of consumers’ intent to repurchase, willingness to recommend, as well as self-identified attitudinal loyalty.)

 
 

We can use the iPhone as an example to understand the categories on the X axis. Its functional differentiation would be things like a great camera, the ability to communicate through iMessage. Its functional concentration would be its ease of use – they have figured out a way to make the iPhone easy to use for basically anyone. The emotional differentiation would be that it makes you feel cool.

None of this means that functional traits don’t matter. Emotional connection just offers the most horsepower to drive loyalty. As we know, people make purchases based on emotional factors and justify them based on rational considerations. This means that the timing of your use of emotional marketing is also important.

 
 

As we see here, emotional connection is most powerful in building initial loyalty among those who don’t yet know you well. “Not yet loyal” people aren’t yet able to discern functional differentiation when they are first getting to know you – that is more impactful later when they are familiar with the brand. The emotional connection is what lures them into becoming a loyal consumer.

Raising Above Brand Creates a More Intense Bond

You can think of emotional connection as having different levels of intensity. They’re all useful, but as you ratchet up the intensity, your impact on loyalty is greater. The “lowest” level would be functional benefits expressed in an emotional way, such as infomercials. Moving up a rung on this marketing ladder, focuses on the emotional benefits of functional traits – an example being the confidence that comes from wearing an effective antiperspirant.

Finally, you have “shared values,” or brand purpose. A shared value is a belief that both our organization and our customers have about a higher purpose, passion, or philosophy that has meaning in our lives beyond our specific genre or the arts in general.  It is more important than the product category itself.

In a study, consumers were about three times more likely to identify high loyalty brands as owning shared values compared to average brands. So this is how we can drive loyalty in that segment of not-yet-loyal audiences.

 

Arts Audiences Reward Emotional Connection with Loyalty

The importance of emotional connection held true in our survey of arts attendees. In our New Loyals survey, we looked at loyalty in terms of likelihood to recommend. The two most powerful factors were having your motivations for attendance met and feeling welcome. In contrast, performance elements (e.g., how they rated the artists or overall performance) offer a less powerful opportunity in terms of improving loyalty. Like consumers, arts audiences reward emotional connection with loyalty.

 

In our audience research, we asked questions of arts attendees to understand the motivations they were looking to have met. For a third of our audiences, they are attracted primarily by what’s on stage or in the exhibit halls. The functional attributes are meaningful and emotional to them. In other words, they love us for us – for our incredible performances and deep love of the art form. However, the remaining 66% express a range of motivations that are often far from what’s on the stage. These are likely our casual customers – and an important segment of our audience. They also are more likely to respond to emotional differentiation, which we can access through shared values. In other words, for the remaining 66%, we want them to love us for what we help them be.

It’s important to understand exactly what a shared value is. To help, we’ve outlined the 5 main characteristics of a shared value.

 
 

At the highest level, a shared value intersects with several other important strategic aspects of your organization. We can differentiate them as follows:

  • Shared Values are our reason for existence, our motivating purpose, it’s why we even thought to create our vision in the first place.

  • Vision is the picture of a future you’d like to see exist. 

  • Mission is a statement of the path you intend to take to help make that vision a reality.

  • Values are the behavioral expectations that we hold ourselves, our stakeholders and our partners to.

Therefore, the real opportunity is to recast yourself as a purpose-driven organization. That’s not about revisiting your strategic plan or mission and values statement – it’s about enhancing the emotional intensity of all that you do by reframing it as a manifestation of your very reason for existence. It’s about making sure that audiences - loyal or not - are aware of what you stand for, what you believe in, what you will fight for. 

 

Now Is the Time for Arts Organizations to Take a Stand

Arts organizations have typically had the benefit of developing emotional connections with audiences through their in-person performances. But in a time where that is not possible for most and where in only rare occasions have arts organizations been able to conjure that emotional response through digital, it is worth looking at how consumer brands who never have the benefit of in-person experiences have been able to pull this off in a spectacular fashion. While it may feel tough for an industry who has typically done this in person to build those connections outside of their walls, who else in the economy is more skilled at emotional storytelling? 

The conclusion of all of this data is clear: now is the time for your organizations to know what it stands for with enough clarity to take a stand. There are both short and long-term opportunities for how arts organizations can act on this, and we will spend time addressing both across the next week.

 

What’s Next

We spent our first session talking about the concept of shared values and digging into our data. Then on Wednesday, we talk about how to build your shared-values statement. Friday we’ll work on bringing your shared values to life in everything you’re doing right now - in engaging audiences, staff and community, and in your partnerships.

Building a purpose driven organization is the way you are going to come through this disruption with audiences intact. We’re so excited to be partnering with you at a time when it really really matters.

 

Additional Summit-Related Resources: