National Performing Arts Convention: The Value of a Seat

Notes from the session "The Value of a Seat"

Moderators: Charles Isherwood, theatre critic, The New York Times; Joanne Steller, vice president, strategic communications, Target Resource Group Speakers: Jon Limbacher, vice president and chief operating officer, St. Paul Chamber Orchestra; Phillip Matthews, director of communications, Theatre Communications Group and manager, Free Night of Theater; Ellen Walker, director of marketing and communications, Pacific Northwest Ballet

Phillip Matthews (Free Night of Theater – TCG)
-started out as a pilot program in 2005
-now in over 100 cities and expect to offer more than 500,000 free tickets this year
-1/3 of audiences made under $50k, and were non-white
-suggestion: when theaters offer complimentary tickets, they should collect the contact information for each attendee so that they can follow up with them and invite them back (as a paid attendee).

Jon Limbacher (St. Paul Chamber Orchestra)
-he felt that if an organization doesn’t have a significant, growing, sustainable audience, it should make you question your purpose
-viewed price as a really important factor in the relationship that an organization has with its patrons. They designed their pricing (most by drastically lowering their prices) to create a “philanthropic” relationship with their patrons rather than a “consumer” relationship with them.
-In their community concert series, their original prices were between $11 and $47. They lowered the prices so that 60% of all tickets are $10 and 40% are $25. They went from have houses at 60% capacity to 90% capacity.

Ellen Walker (Pacific Northwest Ballet)
-their goal is to maximize price for each seat sold
-when a performance is sold to 80% capacity, they raise all tickets by $5. Once the performance is sold at 90% capacity, they raise all tickets by $10.
-they continue to have access programs for patrons that cannot afford full price tickets.
-on average, this dynamic pricing structure brings in $200,000 more in earned revenue per year than the previous model
-the company has several hundred thousand attendees each year, and in the five years that they have had dynamic pricing, they have fielded one complaint from a patron
-there was much more internal debate over dynamic pricing then there was customer dissent

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Thinking about creating a blog (Part 2)...

If you are thinking about creating a blog for your organization, there is one thing I cannot stress enough: make sure those who will be contributing content have bought into your idea! I have created a couple of blogs for different organizations, and I must say that I have learned this the hard way. Don't get me wrong. I think that blogging is very effective if done right, but that is a really big IF. Many organizations launch blogs and don't do it right, and when the blog fails they blame it on the ineffectiveness of the technology. Readers of a blog don't want to get hit with your marketing messages! If you try a hard sell technique with every blog, of course your readers are going to start tuning out your blog. You need to offer your readers a reason to read your blog, and a way to do that is to offer exclusive content that they can't get anywhere else. This is the reason that while at Virginia Stage Company, I started to post video clips of rehearsal and "behin...
Read more

Marketing Awareness.

Modern marketers tend to get very excited by ideas of conversation and engagement with customers. Given that they are aware how many images and messages each of us receive every day, they have become less impressed by the more basic aim of generating awareness. This, I think, is why this pun-based campaign has received such criticism from within the advertising world. Some complain that the imitation of Morgan Freeman is a deceitful hijacking of the actor's gravitas while others just deem it trite, shouty advertising disguised as something else. But that is to overlook context. It's an ad for insurance. Insurance stubbornly remains a commodity business where price trumps service because we buy it before we need it. The engagement with the product/service occurs at a time of distress and not at a time of purchase. In a commodity business, awareness is key. You want your customer to have your name come to mind when they consider the purchase. It's brutally simple. A differen...
Read more

Thinking Inside The Box.

Image
A combination self-help and business book, Michael Port's Beyond Booked Solid focusses on scalability issues and how to expand a small enterprise. It is filled with pragmatic tools and techniques designed to grow a business via innovation and leveraged income, but the key message is that of developing a mind-set that works on your rather than in your business. To some extent that's just a reframing of the old adage of keeping one's eye on the big picture, but it's something that can't be repeated too often. Constantly reminding yourself and your colleagues of why you're in business (and specifically what customer needs you meet by doing something better than anyone else) is crucial to evaluating everything that you do day to day. If your marketing tactic du jour, your latest product development or your inter-departmental meeting isn't centred on that, they're not worth your time and resources.
Read more