Hi and welcome back. We've been talking a lot about defining you, what you do, what you want to present to the world and so on and so forth. But none of that is going to be worth a hill of beings. If you don't also have a very clear idea of who your market is. Let's start with by reviewing what is a market? The first thing you have to remember is that markets are made up of consumers. They are people. Sometimes you will see folks use market or industry interchangeably, but they're different. Industry is made up of producers, markets are made up of consumers. As we mentioned when we talked about the entrepreneur maximum, market is defined by a shared set of needs, sensibilities, or desires. That's why I've used the rare hot pink font for that concept. It's very, very, very important; shared set of needs, sensibilities, and desires. The market for jazz is made up of folks who are already fans of jazz or could become fans because of their other interests and sensibilities and given their personal characteristics. Next, your market is made up of those people or institutions who consume your product or could potentially consume your product. If you are performing, your market is made up of your audience and your potential audience. If you are a teacher, your market is your students, and if these are kids, also their parents, so you've actually got two markets that you have to serve. If you are a music therapist, it is your patient's, etc. The purpose of marketing is twofold. It is therefore to keep your existing market engaged, keep them coming back to your performances, keep them continuing to pay you for lessons, whatever it might be, and also hopefully engage new members of your audience. How are markets actually defined? There's a number of ways and these are all important. First of all, there can be geography. If you are doing a private studio and you don't have any remote desire to do remote teaching or doing any remote teaching, you're physically located in a place, then there is a geographic limit to how far away people are going to come in order to take a lesson with you every week. Geography can be defined broadly like a country or region, or it could be down to a specific zip code. Geographic could also be defined in terms of areas of dense population or rural areas of relatively dispersed population. Climate could be a geographic defining principle. These are the ways that we define a geographic limit, if you will. But then there's demographic. We're familiar with this one: age, gender, education, income, race, ethnicity, nationality, social class, family structure, kids or no kids, sexual identity, all of these things are demographics. These are ways that we categorize types of people and we can maybe combine geographic with demographic if we want, in fact, we often will as we'll see in a second. Then there's this thing called psychographic. This is a term that maybe you haven't heard before. This has to do with more of those sensibilities that I talked about before. These are your attitudes, your opinions, the way you look at the world, the things that tend to appeal to you and the things that don't appeal to you. Then there's behavioral. This is that last thing when I said shared needs and sensibilities is part psychographic and then if they become customers, it's now a behavioral thing. They have made the transaction, they have taken the effort, made that step to purchase the ticket, to book a lesson with you and pay you for it. This is behavioral ways of classifying people. Now there's this thing called market segmentation. In other words, we want to take all of the things we were just talking about, geographic, demographic, psychographic, and behavioral and determine which portion of the population is going to share the characteristics that are most likely to make them a customer. That means that they have to fit the right demographic profiles and they also have to share a neat interest or sensibility. We're going to look at a bunch of examples of these to help you see how market segmentation works. Because it's important again, as I said, a few lessons back, nobody's product, even the most popular pop star in the world, appeals to everybody. You've got to find that part of the market that is perfectly suited to what you have to offer. I'm going to take a hypothetical here, the Drambuie Music Center. This is a place that traditionally presents classical music, so concert music. But they're thinking about starting a jazz series. How are they going to go about determining whether or not this is a good idea? Well, first of all, they've got to figure out, is there a market for this? Are there people out there who want to come to a jazz series at the Drambuie Music Center. Here's how they might go about working out their potential market. First there's a geographic limit up on the upper left-hand side of this graphic here. Within 10-15 miles of town they've decided that people probably are not going to drive more than 15 miles to come and see their shows. Maybe that's based on the data that they have, the behavioral element of their existing classical music audience, that nobody comes more than about 50 miles. Maybe that's simply understanding the way people are in that community, that they don't tend to drive a long way. Maybe there's another town 20 miles away and if they get outside of that 10-15 mile perimeter, they're more likely to go to that place than drive in to see something at the Drambuie Music center. They've determined the 10-15 miles radius of town is a geographic limit that they want to place on this. Then there are those folks who are aware of the center. They have gotten a flyer in the mail, they've seen a billboard in town, maybe they drive past it every day, and they see the marquee, Drambuie Music Center. They have some awareness of the center but they've never gone inside and gone to a shop. Then there are those who aren't interested in jazz. Now, how are you going to determine whether or not someone is interested in jazz? That's probably the trickiest part of all of this. But we can maybe talk about a couple of possibilities there. Then for each of those little intersections, you'll see these little gray circles around there. There are folks who have been to concerts before, and so they're a really good indicator of the characteristics of your audience, at least for the classical music series. Then where those circles intersect, that's your potential market. The green thing in the center there. If we wanted to put real numbers to this, we could say, in this community, the total population within 10-15 miles is 20,000 people. We know that we have a mailing list of 5,000 people, let's say. There's a lot of traffic that goes by the center every day because it's the main street in town. So maybe we can't quantify that, but we could probably say another 1000 is a reasonable thing. Now, we're at about 6,000 of those 20,000. We know who has been to concerts before. How are we going to determine who might be interested in jazz? Well, there could be a couple of different ways of doing that. Is there any jazz going on in town at all? If so, how's that been going? Maybe there is a club in town that does jazz on Thursday nights and every Thursday night the place is packed. That gives you an indication that there is at least some folks who are interested in jazz. They may or may not be aware of the center and they are in a particular geographic thing. You see how we go about segmenting the market down to the most likely people, and then we target them with our marketing efforts. Let's look at some hypothetical examples. Let's say that you're a composer of choral music, how are you going to go about determining which market segmentation is going to give you the best chance of identifying choruses that are going to be interested in performing your music. The first, when we say choral groups who might be interested in your music, well, what sort of music are you writing? If you're writing sacred music, then most likely church choruses are going to be your primary market. If you're writing music that is meant to be accessible to amateur groups, in other words it's not super hard, then maybe community choruses, maybe K-12 choruses. It's not on the list here, but that would be another really great market segment to consider. Maybe it's the other end of the spectrum. If it's really difficult thorny music, well then, professional choruses are going to be much more likely. It's a much smaller market but there are professional choruses out there. That's going to be one useful way to begin to segment your market, because again, nobody's music is going to appeal to all choruses out there equally. Then within that, it's going to be groups that perform new music because that's what you're doing. You're writing music as a living composer. The magical choir that hasn't sung anything past 1850 is probably not going to be interested in your music unless you have a really close connection with them and you pitch them some crazy project. But that's going to be a long shot. Certainly, not for a cold call or a mail. That narrows the market down in a different way. Then ideally, courses we've already performed your work. They're going to hopefully want to do it again. Hopefully, it was a positive experience and they're going to want to do it again. Those are three segments that will give you some really great market segmentation and a good handle on a potential market for you to approach. That's another one, private teaching studio. First, you've got to make a couple of decisions. You've got to decide, am I going to only teach in person, which means you're staying local, or am I going to allow myself to be remote as part of or all of what I do? That will, in turn, determine whether or not geographic parameters are important consideration for this. Once you've determined that, then the other is do you want to limit to a specific age group? You're just really interested in teaching kids and largely who are going to be beginners. Maybe you're really interested in adult learners. Maybe you really want to focus on seniors, because you have a calling to do that work. That will also determine how you want to segment your market. Let's say that you decide that you want to do in person only, you're going to stay local. Well, then what's the population within this given geographical range? Number of households with a certain level of disposable income? Because a household with almost no disposable income or really limited means, they're not going to have the money to be hiring a piano teacher, let's say, to teach their kids. Population or residence within chosen age range and geographical location, and then of that houses of a certain level of disposable income and then last, population of folks who might be interested in music lessons. Now, that's probably going to be the hardest one to figure out, and we're going to talk in our next lesson, how you can maybe get a handle on some of these psychographic things. Another example, I want to just do a lot of different examples here because you all are pursuing different things. Let's say you want to do a house concert series [inaudible] , suppose it doesn't have to be a classical music, but you're going to do house concerts. First of all, number of homes large enough to accommodate house concert. It's probably going to be certain neighborhoods or certain parts of your community where the homes are larger, number of households with higher levels of income, so that's another thing. Again, unless you have some amount of means or disposable income, you're not going to be hiring people to come in and do a house concert for you and your 50 closest friends. Then again, the psychographic one, population interested in classical music. How do you figure that out? That's my teaser, we have to come back. Let's say you're doing a wedding band, individuals who are planning on getting married. Now, that's a really interesting one. Think about how you might try to determine that. Venues that host weddings and wedding receptions, and then the population of folks who might be interested in your particular genre or style of what you do. That's an interesting question because this one has a number of psychographic elements. Again, we'll talk next about how you get to those psychographic things. As you can see, there are a lot of different ways to get a handle on the potential market for your product or service. The broad parameters of market segmentation, things like geography, demographics, psychographics, and behaviors are always going to apply in one way or another. But the particular of those various categories and the relative importance of each one is going to change from situation to situation, as I've tried to demonstrate with these examples, where some might have a very important element of geographic proximity and others that's not even relevant. What's important, though, no matter how you end up siding, it's best to segment your market, that you don't make assumptions about the market that you're hoping to get in touch with. You've got to do research as best you can and there will always be an element of guesstimation to this. You can't always come up with hard numbers for every single parameter of your market segmentation, but the more you can, the better it will be. We're going to talk a little bit more about that in the last lesson. I want to close with a note about diversity because this is something that has become a very hot topic in the performing arts, especially in classical music, but in all other genres. When we talk about market segmentation, sometimes that can get us into some sticky territory. That's because we're in charge of determining the parameters that we want to use to define our markets as we've just been discussing. You have to decide what are the key things that are going to most reveal, or best reveal my potential market, and those parameters might in fact end up excluding certain classes of people without any intention on our side to discriminate. Sometimes folks will look at a lack of diversity in let's say a concert audience and say, well, they need to be marketing differently, but on the other hand, marketing expressly at, for instance, a particular racial demographic is also inherently discriminatory. How do we address this? Because this is a real problem and it's tricky. The first step is to recognize that marketing can't fix anything in and of itself. Okay? Marketing can't make people want a product that is a crappy product. It's certainly in the arts anyway, and just marketing to a particular population of people is not going to suddenly make them want to come to your concerts. We have to look at broader issues. Like what are you programming? Who is in this organization? If it's an orchestra and everybody on the stage is white, then a person of color is going to feel like, well, I don't see myself represented there. I don't see myself represented in the personnel. I don't see myself represented in the repertoire or whatever it is that's being programmed. I don't see myself represented on their board of directors or amongst their volunteers. Those are issues that an arts organization needs to address first and foremost. Then you've got to look at who are the gatekeepers? Who are the gatekeepers to auditions, jobs, grants? Maybe we don't see more diverse new music being written because the systems in place are funneling commissioning money to largely white men, for instance; and so there are these structural, systemic things that have to change first before marketing can even be contemplated. Lastly, if we try to market without taking these steps, not only is it not going to be effective, but it could be even damaging because it ends up looking performative and inauthentic and that will actually hurt your course even more than if you hadn't tried, to begin with, right? So really, marketing is the last step of engaging your potential market. The first step in this particular case is to get the right people in the room and listen to what they're telling you. If we can do that with sincerity and intention and responsiveness, then marketing can be a helpful tool to get that message out into the community and to begin to engage new audiences but until we do the hard work of the systemic structural issues, marketing is not going to save the day.
