Recap: Coming Back Stronger Kickoff Session

October 29 (Replay at end of page)

Full materials available here for download

We were delighted to kick off our virtual summit, Coming Back Stronger, and are so grateful for our members’ attendance. Our goal for this Summit is not simply to give you information but to provide you with tools, resources, a new vision and tangible activities and strategies to help move your organizations forward during this time. 

The key theme of our Summit is how to use the shutdown to rebuild audience loyalty. While it may seem like a strange time to discuss audience loyalty, we believe it is the exact moment in time to place urgency on this issue.  Every organization in our membership has decided to stay open in some form. Given how hard you all have fought to keep your marketing and programming people on staff, it’s critical that you use them in the right way. If organizations can improve the value of their efforts now to engage audiences, we believe they will see huge benefits later. 

The Risks We Are Facing

Prior to the pandemic, most arts organizations were already facing a long slow decline of subscriptions, leading many organizations on a costly path to chase single ticket buyers. The pandemic has brought two new risks to audience loyalty:

1.     Non-return by a significant portion of casual audiences 

2.     Steeper decline in loyal audiences compared to pre-pandemic

History tells us that large disruptions change behaviors. With most organizations facing more than 9-18 months of closure, there is no question that people may develop new habits, new sources of entertainment and new substitutes. While we anticipate pent up demand and know that for many of our most loyal subscribers it will be a joyous return, we cannot necessarily trust our broader audiences when they tell us they’ll be back. 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. 

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. Not surprisingly, a poll during our morning summit session showed that only 10% of respondents feel they have been most effective at engaging single ticket buyers or new audiences during the pandemic. 

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 Differentiation Drives Loyalty

To begin answering the question of how arts organizations can use this period of shutdown to build audience loyalty, we played an ad from the beauty brand, Dove, that aired back in 2013. 

As you can see, at no point in this video does Dove mention any of their products. They focused on a concept – helping women see their real beauty. Dove is not alone in this approach. Take Nike, for example, who rarely mentions a shoe in any of its advertisements. Their recent campaign supporting Colin Kaepernick again focused on more of a concept, than a product. Similarly, Oreo recently released a commercial in partnership with PFLAG to promote accepting your children as they are. Many consumer brands have been on this journey to crank up their emotional connection to consumers for years now and for good reason according to our data sources. 

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.) 

What exactly do we mean by emotional differentiation? Consider the iPhone as an example. 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. As Steve Jobs said, Microsoft has no style. He was focused on making consumers feel slick through use of his products. 

While functional attributes certainly matter, emotional connection offers more horsepower in driving loyalty. Even more interesting, 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.

We can think of emotions on a spectrum. At the bottom there are functional benefits – this is generating excitement around specific functional aspects of the product or service. Then moving up the spectrum there are emotional benefits. For example, an anti-perspirant isn’t about reducing moisture, its about giving you confidence. It’s the emotional benefits derived from functional attributes. At the very top of the spectrum is what we call a shared value. A shared value is more of a concept of who you are – what the brand stands for above the category. It is a shared belief among you and your audience about some higher purpose, passion that sits above your specific genre. It is at this higher-order emotional connection where brands can really differentiate and build loyalty.

Now Is the Time for Arts Organizations to Take a Stand

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 less powerful of an opportunity in terms of improving loyalty. Like consumers, arts audiences reward emotional connection with loyalty. 

Arts organization 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 few weeks. 

What’s Coming Next

We’ll spend next week talking about the concept of shared values and digging into our data a little further.  Then in week two, we will talk about how to craft your shared values statement-  through self-reflection on your organization’s reason for being and eliciting audience values.

In week 3 we’ll get very practical about the implications of a shared values strategy on what you’re doing right now - in engaging audience, staff and community, and in your partnerships.

ABA is honored and excited to be guiding our membership through this strategy at a time when it really matters. We believe you can use this time — and your skills as master storytellers — to explain how your gift of the arts serves a higher purpose.   Not just in the way we justify our education programs or community engagement — but as a way to attract people to our brand and help them feel truly connected to us.  That’s the core concept of shared values.

Additional Summit-Related Resources: 

• Join our summit LinkedIn group: 

• Week 1 pre-read content - return to the content page or just listen to the podcast version, below

Watch the Recording Here