Arts and culture leaders have a tough but rewarding task: creating and leading sustainable organizations that deliver real social value. There is a lot of competition out there. Being an effective leader means constantly adapting, cleverly using the best tools to reach as many people as possible. This course is designed to help leaders at any level do just that.
4.4 | Public, Product, Place, Promotion & Pricing
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From the course by University of Pennsylvania
Arts and Culture Strategy
ratings
From the lesson
Where Do We Stand? Making Choices
A tension exists between artistic/mission and economics. As much as we’d like to try, we can’t be everything to everyone. We must find alignment and balance. How do you recognize and systematically respond to changes in your community? In this unit we’ll explore advancing your mission through a sharp focus on customers and markets; how best to understand the needs and interests of stakeholders; how to identify the best target-customer segments for your organization/project; and how to attract and retain those customers.
Meet the Instructors
Peter FrumkinProfessor
Nonprofit Leadership Program, School of Social Policy & Practice
Mrs. Russell Willis TaylorLecturer, School of Social Policy & Practice; Past President & CEO, National Arts Strategies
[MUSIC]
Let's talk today about marketing and
how you need to understand the organizations around you,
the people you're trying to serve, the broader community in which you operate.
Let's start to think about what it might mean to develop a marketing approach,
a marketing plan.
I'm gonna deliver for you today one simple tool that I think you can
use to start on the road to developing a real marketing perspective.
Now, in the arts context,
there's some sensitivity about this question about marketing.
How much should you listen to the should you listen to demand, to the audience?
To what extent should you actually just develop your own product and
then find a way to compel people to buy it or to consume it?
I actually think you need to take a soft approach.
A soft marketing approach that says, I have a fundamental idea of what value
looks like in this world in which I'm operating, but I need to make sure
that I position what I have in a way that's gonna resonate with the world.
So, I definitely don't think you're in the pure business
of open ended market research.
I think you are starting with something in the arts world.
You're starting with some clear sense of what is valuable and what you really
wanna go after but what I want to invite you to think about is, this idea
that maybe you could get some benefit from starting to understand demand more fully.
So how do you start to think about marketing?
The most basic way
you start to think about marketing is by defining what people call the five Ps.
If you put these together, you start to get a picture about what it might mean
to develop a marketing approach.
The five Ps include Publics.
They include different types of people you're going to interact with.
And by Publics, we mean everything from the output public,
meaning the people who are going to be at the end using your product or
service, in this case the audience is gonna consume it.
The people who are going to pay for it.
The throughput publics, who are gonna be the staff and
creators of the product and those are gonna be critical people.
And then the input publics are gonna be all the forms in which you get support
needed to actually to generate the art.
But you're gonna have a serious of Publics,
a serious of audiences that you're gonna want to relate to.
From those that commune, to those who produce and to those who facilitate and
each one of them is gonna be part of your world.
Beyond that first P, there are four other critical Ps,
Product, Place, Promotion, and Pricing.
I'm gonna drive down into each one of these five Ps and then we'll see how we
can pull them together into an approach that says there's a way of
thinking systematically about marketing that brings these elements all together.
So public, what are the public that's your serving,
I think there's essentially many different kind of ways to think about the public but
I think you should think about as a grand funnel, ranging from the mass market,
which is basically everyone, down to a select group of market segments or groups
of people that you think are particularly interested in what you're doing.
Down to market and itches even tighter definitions of specialty
groups that are gonna be very clearly responsive to what you have, and
all the way down to individuals who might really want what you're producing.
And the big question is,
how much customization do you want in your programs?
How much do you wanna try to go from mass market all the way down to the bottom
of the of the funnel?
How narrow can you make your plan?
I think the answer's gonna vary tremendously based on the resources you
have and the breadth of the audiences you're trying to reach.
But the bottom line is, you're gonna have a lot of choices about how wide or
narrow you wanna go.
If there are many different ways to cut up and distinguish different groups or
segments in the market, the big question is, how do you choose the one to go after?
How do you define the one target group or
the several groups that you're gonna actually focus on in your efforts to
get people on your side to get them interested in what you're doing?
I think there are gonna be a number of considerations.
One is, what are you trying to accomplish?
That's gonna shape who you're gonna go after, what groups you're gonna focus on.
You also need to consider the resources it's gonna take to reach
different segments.
Some segments are gonna be very easily accessible.
Others are gonna take enormous amounts of work.
So for example, just among the kind of input publics,
or the donor side of this, they're gonna be in some cases very hard to get to.
On the other hand, it may be very easy to reach
community members nearby through various communications that you can easily launch.
So there's gonna be enormous variation I think in the research that's needed to
reach each of the segments you want to communicate to.
Then there's this question of collaborators and partners.
Who else is out there and
how do I choose a target based on who else could help me get to that target?
If you have someone that you could work with that could give you easy access to
a particular group or
segment, that's gonna make it more compelling to go after it.
Finally, there's the question of how likely is it that you're gonna succeed
in securing the support of the target segment you're going after?
There's gonna be some that are gonna be high risk, high reward.
Others are gonna be much lower risk and much lower reward.
You're gonna need to make a judgement about where to spend your time and energy.
Which of these segments is gonna matter most to getting to your mission?
The second part of marketing,
a second P of marketing, comes around this question of the product.
Products often are complex and multidimensional.
Product lines often express the idea that you don't just do one thing.
You do a lot of different things.
So in the case of Newman's Own, an organization that produces a lot of food
products and gives all the funds and profits that it generates away to charity,
they have a lot of different things that they do, and
they can be thought of in three different ways.
One is the question of product line breadth.
How many different products are offered?
In this case, there's a lot of different things out there.
Second, what's the product line length?
How many different segments are covered by these products?
Third, there's a question of product line depth.
How many different types of products exist in each segment?
So for each group,
how many different options are there in terms of what's available.
So in the dressing line, how many different dressings are there?
How many different pizzas are there and so forth?
In planning a product line, you need to take very careful consideration about
breadth, length and depth and you need to make choices, that are gonna try to give
you the greatest chance possible to reach as many possible segments as you can.
On the other hand, if you go too broad it can prove to be very diffuse and
very expensive.
So there needs to be a balancing moment where you start to think about,
what's the optimal size of the product line I'm going to offer?
Let's just give you an example in the arts of what a product line might look like.
Think about the Brooklyn Academy of Music in New York.
They have a lot of different things that they offer.
They offer theater, film, dance, music productions, opera, visual arts,
literary readings, classes, art classes, all sorts and special events.
They have a whole range of different things that are available at BAM.
And within each of these areas,
each of these product areas, there's a lot of variation.
So within theater, there's experimental, there's mainstream,
there's a whole bunch of variations.
Within each of these areas you can drill down and go deeper,
but the bottom line is that for an organization to start to construct
this idea of a product line, it needs to have a sense of who's out there.
What would they be possibly interested in?
And how can we start to develop programs and
offerings that start to meet the needs of groups of people?
The third P, beyond public, beyond product, is Place.
And here the question is,
how is it that you're going to reach the intended segments.
What's the channel you're going to use?
Is it going to be a direct channel to the target market in
the form of a direct outreach, a direct connection to them?
Or is it gonna be an indirect one where you partner with another organization, or
you go through an intermediary to try and get to them?
There's a lot of variation in the ways in which you can try to access your target
populations, and
a lot of different places in which this interaction can actually unfold.
So let's back to the example of BAM.
They can connect on their main venue in Brooklyn but
they also can connect and they do online.
They also have travelling shows that they move around
to bring the programs to people in different venues.
Finally, they also have a whole set of activities that they do in schools.
So there's a range of places and
venues and tracks through which they communicate their art to the public, and
good marketing starts to think systematically about this question, about
what is the best channel, what is the best way to reach the intended audience?
In the case of school children, it's gonna be very different than compared to
local residents, professional people living in Manhattan or Brooklyn.
Next P is Promotion, this is the message that you're gonna use.
You may have a powerful idea about what you want to produce but
you gotta be able to express it clearly, and the promotion's gonna be the message
you're gonna use to convey to the world what it is that you have and
why the customer should actually be interested in what you have to offer.
Now, there's gonna be a lot of possible ways in which you can communicate value,
we know that.
The question is, can you differentiate different segments of the public
that are gonna be responsive to different types of messaging?
That's the art of really crafting a marketing approach,
is having a differentiated approach that says,
we're not gonna use the same message every time we communicate with a group,
we're gonna change it and mix it depending on who we're trying to connect to.
So when it comes to BAM, our example here,
they have one overarching message which is that BAM is adventurous.
That's the word they used over and over again.
And they surround that with some other language about the things that they do
in terms of global and local communities across different forms of arts,
and the way in which they showcase both emerging and modern masters.
But the bottom line is they try to brand and focus their offerings and
their messaging around this issue of adventurous,
that's there's something powerful, fresh, and new that goes on at this institution.
There's another dimension also which you have to consider, this other P, Price.
Who will pay?
And that's a complicated question that you need to ask early on,
which of these segments will pay?
And maybe the case is, some segments will pay everything, and
other segments will pay nothing.
And that there'll be a cross subsidy between segments, that the school children
will pay nothing but the major production audience members will pay a lot and
that there'll be some cross-subsidy across all the different revenue streams,
be it film or dance or whatever, in the case of a band.
And then the question is also, you need to ask is,
how much variation can there be in price before people get unnerved by it?
And that has particularly to do with the question of price within segments,
not across segments markets, but within segment.
How much variation can yu allow?
Are you comfortable with someone sitting next to someone else who's paid
a different price?
When it comes to BAM's actual pricing policy, they have an enormous variety
of pricing points across all those different programs I described.
It ranges from nothing all the way to well over $100 for
the cost of these experiences.
Their goal is to give people across a whole of different segments
a lot of different possible price points in which to
In which to interact with the organization.
Now, here's where we get to where I think I can help
with at least one way in which you can start to pull
all this complexity around marketing into a simple framework and tool.
You could spend probably the better part of a year
in just a marketing class focusing on the elements of these five piece.
We're not gonna do that here, but what I want you to do,
I want you to think about each of this five Ps, these different publics.
The product, place, price and promotion that might be used, and
I want you to think about organizing it into a grid, into a framework or
a matrix that brings these elements together, and what I'm particularly
interested is how would the Product, the Place, Price, and Promotion vary,
depending on the market segment that you're going to be focused on?
Here's one example I put together of BAM.
A simplified version of what their marketing matrix might look like.
If you think about their publics, they include Subscribers, Individual Donors,
School Kids, Corporate & Foundation donors, Out-of-Town Visitors to New York.
The products they offer range immensely from a subscription series to special
events in galas for donors, to education programs, to visibility for the corporate
audience, and to the kinda of a New York art experience for out-of-town visitors.
The Place also shifts considerably across the main campus all the way to schools and
special locations.
Price, as I said, across these different groups is gonna vary tremendously,
from a modest discount for subscribers who buy entire series, to full paid prices for
out-of-town visitors who wanna come and cherry pick one or two things.
And similarly the messaging and the promotion's going to vary tremendously,
I think, across these different publics.
From Subscribers, they're gonna use this language of adventurous art, for
Individual Donors it's this idea of building a strong institution outside of
Manhattan that builds New York's art scene.
For School Kids it has to be something around fun and
educational opportunity for them.
And for Corporate & Foundation donors, the message has to be focused on this idea
of being part of the community, giving back to the neighborhood.
And of course for Out-Of-Town guests and visitors to New York,
the message to them is to come see the cutting edge in New York arts.
And so there's a different mix depending on each of these different
publics from subscribers to individual donors,
school kids, corporate donors, out-of-town visitors.
BAM needs to have a different mix of Product, Place, Price, and Promotion.
And the only thing I really wanna focus on, your attention today, is this idea
that marketing involves getting clear about what are those core groups.
You can go into a lot more detail about the segments than I have here,
you can drill down much more deeply, but it also depends on the second move,
which is thinking through how Place, Price, Promotion, and
even the Product shifts depending on what target segment you're thinking about.
The core of marketing comes down to this idea that one size does not fit all.
That the exchange relationship you're trying to set up,
it's gonna depend on the nature of the public you're serving and
it's going to involve some kind of mix across these
different dimensions that's gonna give you the best and highest probability of
success in terms of convincing people to accept the value you're offering.
[MUSIC]
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