 And it was pretty packed. So, exactly. So I just want to get to know everybody just a little bit better. So my name is Chad Baum and I'll be the facilitator this morning. Just to give you a little bit of information about me. I'm currently the managing director of Milwaukee Repertory Theater. It's a regional theater in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. We've got about a $10 million operating budget, just to give you some size. Prior to that, I was the director of marketing of the Smithsonian Associates, which the Smithsonian has a $1.2 billion operating budget. So the scope is kind of crazy. And then before that, I was at arena stage running marketing and communications. And so I come from a performing arts background. Spent a very brief amount of time outside of performing arts and realized that my strength is back in the performing arts and I also teach. So a lot of what you're going to see today is actually what I would teach my graduate students about marketing planning, marketing strategy. Just so I can get to know who's in the room. Can we just go around briefly and sort of let me know a little bit about yourself and your company and sort of the marketing infrastructure? Just briefly the marketing infrastructure. There isn't a right answer, just depending on the marketplace. Traditional media can still be incredibly strong. So we're just introducing ourselves. So just can you tell me your name and where you're from? And a little bit very brief about your marketing infrastructure. It's fantastic to have an artistic person in this room. I'd say about half of today we're going to actually talk about how marketing influences planning. So I think it's a lot of places where we get lost a little bit because we think of send out the email, send out the newspaper, that kind of stuff. But it starts way earlier than that, so. I know Don, very good. Okay, great, I'm not going to work. I was going to say, I don't think I've ever used anything but Tessitura. So going back to Santa Fe Opera, which was, I think, one of your first, what, five or six clients? Two, number two, yeah. Brian? Good morning. Sometimes it's easier to grow when you don't have to change things, right? Well, great, just out of curiosity, how many people that do have marketing departments or represent marketing departments sit in on season planning? So we've got about 90 slides, and we've got about two hours to do it. So this is like lightning marketing, right? As we go through, don't be shy, please ask questions. You're going to find that I'm very opinionated, and I hope that you're very opinionated because that will lead to better discussion. So if, and I think this is Vijay, and Vijay is live streaming this. And actually, Vijay and I worked together at arena stage. So it'll be live streamed as well. Are they going to be also recording and posting it somewhere? Is that, technology has not been my friend this morning. So let's, okay, here we go. So in a healthy arts organization, you basically have three things. You have healthy artistic output, you have managerial soundness, and you have customer input. And a lot of times people forget about this when they think about this or this, but it's kind of a triangular situation. If you look at the unhealthy arts organizations, you can actually be unhealthy here, unhealthy here, or unhealthy there, in any different types of situations. You can have a very sound business operation with a good balance sheet, but sucky artistic product, right? And that's not a sound arts organization. You can have phenomenal artistic product and a company that's going out of business. Or you can have what could be considered good artistic product. And a relatively sound balance sheet, but not have any response from your customer base. Particularly if your customer base is changing. And if you're in a major metropolitan city, your customer base is changing. Does this make sense to everybody? Great. So what is marketing? A lot of times we think about marketing, particularly as when we're selling things, there's sort of transactional marketing. So the idea is at the very basic level, we've got to tell every single person in the world about what we're doing and then they're gonna buy tickets, right? Well, telling isn't as successful as you would imagine. Your job is not just to tell people what you're doing, but your job is to actually present value in what you're doing. That's an entirely different way of thinking about things. It's a process when you think about the relationship between the product and the customer. And sometimes when I give these speeches, a lot of people take unbridge to the fact that I call our artistic things product. But it actually is product. So I'm just gonna ask your forgiveness for a second. Put away the connotations of the word product. But in terms of marketing, we're gonna talk about the marketing piece here later in the presentation. And product is the top of them. So we need to figure out how to way to connect our product to our customer base. And particularly if you're doing work that's more esoteric, you're gonna have to have a translator. And that translator is marketing. And we'll talk about that here later. And the last thing is in this slide here is you have to demonstrate value to the customer. So let's get into this just briefly here a second. What is the value of an artistic experience? So at Milwaukee Rep and like model theater companies across the nation, we do a Christmas carol every holiday season. What is the value of a Christmas carol? What's the primary value? Why do you think people buy tickets to a Christmas carol? Is it because they wanna see the same story every single year? Or is it because they wanna have a memorable holiday experience with their children? It's tradition, right? And they're building a family oriented tradition. That is the value, not necessarily seeing the same story over and over again, right? So what's the role of marketing in a mission driven organization? Even if you're for profit, you still have a mission. You still have something that you're trying to accomplish. Basically the role of marketing is to translate the artistic vision into a language that consumers understand. How many folks work and work with artistic directors or artistic planning folks that speak in a language that comes from graduate school? Is this, no? Okay, so, well this is being live streamed so it might get me in trouble later. But I faced a lot of this at the Smithsonian Institution where you're dealing with people that have five PhDs running large museums and they're incredibly amazing at their knowledge. And I wasn't a visual arts person and I came up with the form and they had to explain it to me so that I could explain it to 99% of the world that doesn't have PhDs in visual arts or in other things like that. So we are a translating mechanism, right? Does that make sense? We are, it's our job to keep our programmatic folks, our artistic folks and everybody else in the organization abreast of what's happening in consumer trends, what's happening in our cities. How many cities are going through major flux right now in this room? Really? Everything else is pretty, okay. Well, Washington D.C. that I was living in was going through some pretty major flux. Milwaukee right now where I live in is going through a lot of major flux. The demographic data that we'll talk about later tells you that pretty much the nation is in flux. And if you're programming for something that looks like your city 30 years ago versus something that looks like your city 50 years from now, you're gonna have an issue. And so it's your job to keep the rest of the organization up to speed on what's going on from a consumer perspective. And the third is kind of the same thing. You're sort of acting as a liaison between artist and consumer. So particularly in the last five to 10 years as media outlets, traditional media outlets have been struggling, newspapers have been struggling. A lot of people have been laying off reviewers, those sorts of things. We've actually gotten ourselves into a position where we are sort of, not sort of, we are producers of content ourselves. So a lot of the stuff that I was working on at arena was trying to get ahead of the curve in the sense that at some moment, traditional media outlets are going to diminish in their impact. And so we were starting to get into places where we were producing our own videos. In fact, that's how I met the J because we're content providers as much as anything. And that allows us to get direct to consumer rather than relying upon a television station or a newspaper to get to the consumer. You want to start creating those relationships yourself. So at its base, there's four basic things that marketing does. And these are kind of the steps that you have to go through to do this. The first is pretty easy. You have to build awareness. So if somebody doesn't know about what it is that you're doing in your community, obviously they're not going to attend. So that's the easiest of them. The second thing is not only do you have to make them aware, but you have to create interest in attending. So they could be aware that you're doing product A on your stage. But the next step is you have to make sure that they develop some sort of interest in that product, even though they might not think it's for them. The third is you have to stimulate a trial action. So if you're, particularly if you're going after a new consumer or a new customer, you need them to try your product. And so that's the third step. And the fourth step is once they try it, and this is actually, most of the companies that I work with as a consultant, they get lost from here to there. There's a study that Oliver Wyman did, and I might get the statistics a little bit messed up, but he did it in 2008, if I remember, that the firm did, and it was the largest symphony orchestra in the United States. And the number of people that came in the door, how many percentage-wise, if you had a new customer, how many do you think come back the next year? Brand new customer. What do you think the percentage was? Okay. Anybody else got to guess? 84% of the people that came for the first time did not attend again. So you're spending a ton of marketing resource, getting people to come into the door, and they never come back. And so a lot of, and that is a huge return on investment cost of sale issue. Because if you don't figure that out, you're going to spend yourself into the poor house, basically. And so that's the difference between three and four. Any questions here on the slide? Besides our friends here that's still studying at Columbia University, how many people took a marketing class in school? No? Okay, great, okay. It's about half. How many people are familiar with the four P's in marketing? Okay. So this is highly contested now between marketing directors, or some marketing directors that tell you there's eight P's in marketing and 20 P's in marketing, and in fact this slide actually shows you that there's seven things that we consider. But there are four basic things of marketing, and we're going to get to it later in the slides. But the four basics are you have product, you have price, you have place, and you have promotion. And those influence your positioning of your company and the people that are going to come to the company. So you can think about, and I just want to pull the room real quickly, out of those four P's, product, place, price, promotion, without me getting into further detail of what they include, what do you think is the predominant influencer on the success of marketing? Okay? Anybody disagree? So who's right? There isn't a right answer. I have my opinion. What's- I would tell you, my opinion is by far, in terms of priority product is at the top. And I'll tell you why. I'll tell you why I think this. Think of the for-profit world. You're building minivans, right? The manufacturer of a minivan doesn't come to the marketing person and they say, you know what? I need you to make this minivan the top selling automobile to the male 18 to 24 demographic. Why would you not do that? I don't care how good a marketing director you have, you're not going to sell a minivan to an 18 year old male. Just not. So how many times in our organizations do you have a product and the product comes to you and they say, you know what? We've got to get younger audiences in the door and you're thinking, wait a second, we've got a product problem. Sound familiar? Okay. So this comes into play later on in how marketing is actually incorporated into the overall organization because if you're trying to get to certain demographics, if you're trying to target specific groups of people and you're trying to have a specific action from them, the primary mover, in my opinion, always has to be the product. Right? Okay. You can argue with me later, but that's what I think. So our goal is to attract new people in a meaningful way to our venue or programming for the long term, right? Any questions? It's a pretty basic statement. But what is a meaningful way? A lot, we're usually really good, like I said, of attracting new people, but are we good at having meaningful interaction with them? Or is it transactional? And specifically transactional. And this is actually where you move from the marketing side of things talking to the person that was going into an external affairs model where marketing and development are under the same bridge. If you do not have a meaningful relationship with that customer, if it's just transactional, if you're a nonprofit, you're never gonna be able to move that patron from a transactional customer into a donor, right? Because if you do not have a meaningful relationship with them, they're not gonna take that next step. So you're looking for new people, you're trying to get them to your venue, you're trying to have a meaningful relationship with them, which will encourage repeat business, right? Okay. So to get new audiences in the door, you're looking at precise targeting, you're looking at relevant benefits, and you're looking at creative communications. So targeting we're gonna get to here in a second. But when we talk about benefits, what are we talking about? What are the benefits of attending your arts organization? I'm gonna call that a competitive advantage and we're gonna get to that in a second. But what is the benefit? What is the person that's receiving it, getting from an artistic experience? Why does somebody come to a Broadway show at one of their Broadway venues? You said a lot of people have Broadway program. Why do they come? What's the purpose? What's the benefit? What are they getting from the experience? They're getting a great memory. They're being exposed to cultures and ideas that they probably wouldn't be exposed to normally in their day-to-day life. They're being challenged in some cases. I just went to go, I don't come from a theater background, and I just went to go see Disgraced yesterday, which completely opened my mind up to a lot of different things and something that I probably wouldn't get to experience from a day-to-day. It stretches boundaries, it creates learning, muscle memory, and your day-to-day lifestyle. So these are all things that are benefits, right? But how many times when we are actually communicating with our audiences, do we communicate the benefit? Or do we just put a picture up and we put review quotes? If you think about this, right? Particularly those people that have subscriber bases, if the actual benefit is you're gonna spend some quality time with your loved one or your mind is going to be opened up to a new world or these sorts of things. How many times do we message those benefits versus come because the reviewer told you it's great? Which, by the way, makes you review dependent, which as we all know, if you are in a market that you review dependent, good luck, right? Who in this room thinks that word of mouth is the most powerful thing of their organizations? We'll get there. I think it's the by far the most powerful marketing agent of the organizations that I've worked at has been word of mouth. Okay, so how does the process work? Well, the first several one through three is all analysis. You've gotta figure out where you are today before you figure out where you wanna go tomorrow. Quantifiable objectives and target markets and strategies, these are all things about planning for the future. And then you have to figure out what's basically what's your budget and who's gonna do it. Pretty simple, right? So the first part is where you at today? What's your mission? Who are your current customers? Who are your potential customers that you don't have already? And who are you in competition for? And this is where I always think it's funny. A lot of people when I talk about the word competition they get really sort of unnerved by that. You are in competition. You might be a non-profit organization and you might want to kumbaya with all the other non-profit organizations in the city which is great. But in many cases you are in competition. So as much as partnering actually is beneficial in a lot of cases, you also have to be mindful about what's going on in the city. I'll just tell you, we came from Milwaukee. We're doing our 40th anniversary of a Christmas Carol and Lion King is in the theater right across the street, right? And they sold $6 million worth of tickets in the markets the size of Milwaukee. We would be foolish to think that we're not in competition with a product at the same time, the same place that's family oriented during a Christmas Carol, right? So you have to think both in terms of where your potential partnerships lie and also in terms of who's your competitors. What are the key issues facing your organization and your industry? The best predictor of how your current organization is doing is how your industry is doing. So in this case, you're at an industry conference. I'm sure APAP puts out studies and other things that says how the industry is doing. I know in my field TCG does that but the best indicator is basically how your field is doing. What are your internal strengths and weaknesses and where are your opportunities and threats? If you're not asking these questions and more importantly, if you're not being truthful about their responses, you're in a little bit of a trouble. Then you have to figure out where do you want to go? And when you answer that question, the answer has to be measurable and attainable and viable or else it's not a good answer. So if you want to say I want to go here but you can't measure where here is at, how are you ever gonna know if you've made progress? Or if you set something that is incredibly unattainable then you're gonna have a real morale problem in your company because you're never gonna get anywhere what it looks like to be a success. And then it has to be financially viable or else the organization's gonna be out of business and it's not gonna make a difference anyways. What strategies and tactics are you going to employ to address the opportunities that are ahead of you? You need to think about getting a feedback loop in your marketing to actually hear what your customers are thinking and that's called 360 degree marketing we'll talk about here in a second. What does the promotion plan target? Who are you speaking to and why are you speaking to? And what messages will motivate them to buy? These are all questions and I'm going through them pretty quickly because we're gonna go dive into them further. Where do they get their messages about leisure time activities? And if you think that you're not only in competition with maybe people that are similar to you I'm gonna tell you right now that actually your major competition at this moment is Amazon Prime. That's your major competition, Netflix, right? Not the Community Symphony Orchestra that's down the street. What can and should you pay for and what could you find pro bono? So if you have a very restricted budget there are times when you actually make the worst decision because you try to find something for free when really you should be paying for it to get better experience. The growth strategy is it gonna require adding more staff and a lot of the time we get a little timid and nervous about adding staff because we don't know what the payoff's going to be. What's the internal process for approving your marketing materials? Last thing you wanna do is get something that looks great, you think is wonderful, you send it out and actually what you're describing isn't the thing that you're producing itself. For example, if you're going to do Shakespeare's Hamlet, we all know what Shakespeare's Hamlet is, we all know how to market it. If you have somebody like, I'm gonna pull off my theater expertise for a second, but if you have somebody like Pam McKinnon who's a pretty traditional director directing Hamlet or if you have somebody like Peter Sellars that's directing Hamlet who is very non-traditional, very avant-garde. The way you market it is gonna be worlds of difference and it's the same product. Well, it's the same play, make sense? And here's the thing, what is it going to cost? And when you think about cost, you have to think about time, money and people. What's the, I always mess this up, but what's that famous saying you can get it fast, cheap or good, pick two out of the three, right? You'll never be able to get all three. So when you're doing your budgets, a lot of time we only think about budgeting for this. We don't think about budgeting for this and we don't think about budgeting for this. How many people in here have subscriber campaigns? You have subscribers, okay? I've been fortunate enough to work at companies that their subscriber bases are increasing, right? And it wasn't because we were spending more money on our subscribers, and often case it was a time issue. And I'll give you an example. When I came to Arena Stage, we were announcing our seasons in April, right? From a timing perspective, that only gave me eight months to sell subscriptions. We moved our entire planning process and they now actually get their first renewals out in January. That's a timing issue. We have three months more to sell than we did before. That's a lot of months. You just bought a lot of time, right? And time is what allows you to sell more subscriptions. Does that make sense? So you gotta think about a timing factor, a money factor, and a human resource factor. And I'll say something that's got me in trouble a lot before, but I'll say it again because I think it's true. If you're struggling right now, if your company is struggling, a lot of us were struggling in 2008, 2009 around the recession. The quickest way to get yourself in trouble is to focus on new audiences. Why do you think that's the case? And again, my opinion, there's gonna be a bazillion other people out there that say I'm wrong. But why do you think I would tell you that if you're currently struggling, focusing on new audiences might exacerbate the situation? Yes, the cost to acquire is generally six times more than the cost to retain. So if you're doing analysis of your company, and for every one person you're bringing in the door, 20 people are running out the back door, your first problem is you've gotta figure out how to stop the hemorrhaging. So you will need to focus on renewal and retention before you focus on acquisition. If you focus on acquisition, you're gonna basically throw fire on our gasoline onto the flames. That's the standard. So that's the typical standard. I will tell you though, arena when I came into the company was having a retention problem. They were having a shrinking subscription base. When I left the company, their focus was not on retention anymore. They had a very, very strong subscriber base that was renewing high. Their focus was then on acquisition. So they were spending a lot of money on acquisition and it was actually very appropriate at that time for them to do so. So it just depends on where you're at in the life cycle of your organization. So when you start doing things, are there things in process to monitor success? Are you looking at ways in which you're tracking new audience members as they come into your organization, the source of their interest in their organization? Do you have a process for encouraging them to come back to their organization? So if you are going to spend money in acquisition and you get them in the door, you've just wasted your investment if you do not have systems to get them back into your organization. So there's a lot of folks now that are in the performing arts field that are heavy into acquisition. They're supposed to be heavy into acquisition. But what they're doing is is as soon as they have an experience, literally that night they're getting an email and the email says thank you for coming to this organization, we're so happy to have you. We hope you had a great time. If you have any concerns, please contact us. We really wanna have you back. And to have you back, we're gonna give you X, Y, and Z. And there's an immediate offer, right? If you get somebody to come back a second or third time, the likelihood that they're going to be a sustaining customer of yours is exponentially larger. And the perfect time to do it is when they've already had just had a fantastic experience with you. Right, we forget. So if you wait three or four days, I've forgotten about you. Particularly if you think that the average consumer gets hit with something like 5,000 marketing messages a day, you need to be on top of it. So if you're spending money in acquisitions and you don't have systems in place to retain those new people, you're wasting your money. Okay. Does your analysis include all the marketing P's? What do you learn about your suppositions around new audiences that needs to adjust in your planning process? Do we learn anything about timing or internal processes? So if you're trying something new, you need to have a mechanism to where you can evaluate whatever that new is. So in a lot of cases, companies have something what they call postmortems. They will try something new, they will evaluate it, they will discuss it, and they will make shifts for the future. If you do not have a way to evaluate what it is that you're doing something with something new, you're never gonna know if it works or not. How many times in our organizations, particularly if you're a staff of one, do we go, you know what, even as a managing director, even when I was at the Smithsonian or at Arena where I had very large marketing departments, we oftentimes, we had to make a decision between, do we spend our time promoting something or do you spend our time doing analysis? I'd figure out where do we go? And almost every single time that I've had to get into that situation, I've made a decision to focus on analysis. And it seems counterproductive. But if you don't know what's working, how are you gonna know where to spend your money in the future? So don't sacrifice your ability to do data analysis and reporting back on what it is that you're doing because you're not gonna learn. And if you're making that mistake now, you're gonna continue making that mistake for the next 10 years. Who are we? So, when you look at yourself, you have to figure out what is your mission and you're looking out from why you exist, where do you wanna go, what's your impact in the community? I hate developing mission statements. It's like the hardest thing to do. In fact, we're doing it right now at Milwaukee. And I think we're now in like our sixth month of developing a new mission statement because this little thing is like three sentences. And it's those three sentences that drive everything that you do. And if you don't get those three sentences right, you're dead in the water. I mean, talk about pressure. Oftentimes, these mission statements are generic. They're abstract. They don't provide a daily guidance. I mean, here's the thing. As an executive director or as a managing director, when there is conflict within your organization, where are we gonna put money? What are we gonna do? Where are we gonna focus on? The mission should answer that conflict. If the mission isn't specific enough to give you daily guidance, you've got a problem with your mission. So, when you're developing a mission, you want it to be precise. You want it to be unique and you want it to be visionary. If it doesn't set you apart, it's not specific enough. But if you get into a place where you're saying, my mission is to develop these specific, I'm gonna do nothing but classical plays, nothing, only in Washington D.C., only on this block of land, only in this theater, only directed by that director. Now you've got a too specific of a mission. So it's gotta be breathable, but it also has to give you some focus. Can everybody on your board and staff recite your mission and know what it is? Anybody can answer that with a affirmative, with a yes? That's pretty impressive if you can. They should all be able to know your mission and be able to say within 30 seconds, it's kind of the elevator speech, what it is that you do. What's a brand? We keep using this word brand. And it's sort of like in the marketing world, I sort of think about, when people talk about brand and they're branding experts, I think of them as sort of like snake oil salesmen. It's like, what is a brand? I'm gonna come in and I'm gonna fix your brand. And it's this sort of intangible sort of quality. Your brand is not your logo. So all the times what happens is design firms will come and they're gonna say, I'm gonna clarify your brand, I'm gonna give you a new logo. No. The first thing you have to do about your brand is you have to figure out who the company is and what's the promise the company is making to the consumer. Design stuff can wait. It's a trusted promise and it capitalates a big idea of what the organization is going to do. I'm gonna skip that one because this is actually more important. When I came to arena, it was interesting. I was, in my first six months, I was in branding meetings because we were looking at opening a new, and they did open a new building and we wanted to clarify our brand. And at the time we thought, okay, we were doing pretty good work, quality work, I would say, but we thought that we were a very premium brand in the marketplace. And so we tested it. We got a whole bunch of consumers together and we said, okay, if we were a car, what car would we be? Would we be a Cadillac? Would we be a Rolls Royce? Would we be a Buick? In my mind, I thought the cancer was gonna come back a Cadillac because the company was specifically doing American work and they thought that they were a premium brand, a very premium brand in the marketplace. You think of premium brand, you think of American, you think of Cadillac. Predominantly, what we were hearing was we were a Buick. Interesting. So, why were we being told that we were, and it was something like 80% of the responses were Buick. But this is interesting, why were we a Buick? We were actually being thought upon as a quality product that was a very good value. That is a completely different brand than a high-end brand that is more like a Rolls Royce. Would you call a Rolls Royce a value proposition, a bargain? No, it's ultra premium. We were not an ultra premium brand in the marketplace. The ultra premium brand in the marketplace was the Washington National Opera. So, what the customers were telling us wasn't what we thought our brand was and which one was accurate. The brand always lives in the customer. I don't care what your chief marketing officer says your brand is, your brand is in the customer. Okay? In that instance, we were lucky enough that we had a market researcher on our board and we helped focus groups. So, there's three big circles. The first one is who are you targeting? The second one is what you're good at and the third one is what differentiates you from the competition. Where they meld is what you should focus on because that's your sweet spot. Oftentimes, we get into situations where we're doing things that we're not good at and is not in our mission. And, scarily enough, a lot of that is actually pushed by donors. Right? You have a foundation that's gonna give you a ton of money to do X, Y, and Z. And you think the mission of the organization doesn't include X, Y, and Z. Do you take the money? Right? Or, when you go, you know, you're a classical theater company, right? And you have declining audiences because as we know nationally, audiences for classical theaters are declining. And so you think, hmm, I'm gonna do big musicals now. Where does that align in your mission? Or, I'm not trying to pick on any specific company because I don't run these companies and Lord knows, you know, I'm being a Monday morning quarterback. But if you are a large opera company and you've decided now that you're gonna do major musicals, is that in your mission? Or is it driven because of economics? So you have to think about what differentiates you, where's your mission, and who you're gonna target. So, some myths of branding, it's easy. It's not easy. Brand is way beyond design. It's about who the company is holistically. Your logo is not your brand. Brands live in the customer base. They don't live in just promotion. They're a crafted experience and they're built on gazillion dollar marketing budgets. In fact, some of the best brands that I've actually seen, at least in the DC era, because that's what I know the best, are built on very small marketing budgets. Woolly Mammoth Theater Company in DC has a very small marketing budget but an exceptionally clear brand, right? So you don't have to have huge marketing dollars. Functions of the brand. One, they need to communicate reputation. They need to tell you about how highly you're rated in the community. How important you are and why you're different. Any questions here? We're flying through brand pretty quickly, so. A brand would create value and meeting consumer needs. If, remember, we are just also in terms of if you're doing marketing for for profits, but also when you're thinking about non-profits. We are there to serve a community, right? So marketing answers the question, what needs are we meeting? We offer a value proposition that is unique and different and we celebrate differences. So here's where I think we get in a lot of trouble with our brand. And again, I'll use an example from Irina because that's my most recent memory. Molly Smith is the artistic director of Irina Stage and when she came to the company, she made a decision that she was going to be focused on American work. Her predecessor and her predecessor's predecessor, there's only been three artistic directors who are actually very focused on world work, a lot of Eastern European work, right? And so she made the decision that this is the brand, for me as a marketing person, a very easy thing to communicate because it was very clear on what she was trying to do. But there was a lot of timeliness amongst donors and boards and staff members to be very communicative on what the brand was. Why? Because for 40 years, we had built an audience for this sort of area and we wanted to be careful. We wanted to say, yes, we're an American theater, but don't tell people too much about that because it might drive them away. A good brand pushes as many people away as it attracts. Right? If you are a lover of classical, populous sort of work, you're probably not going to want to go to Woollimama Theater Company, which is known for sort of pushing the edge new work. Do you think Woolli is concerned about all the people that they're not attracting? They might be, but their defined brand is so strong that it has to be to attract new people. So for example, I see computers in the room, right? What is the brand differential between Apple and non-Apple? Apple is a very small part of the market, in the computer market, very small. Do you think that they're concerned about telling people that they're not for everybody? In fact, the way that they sell is to tell people we're not for everybody, right? That's what makes them a strong brand, makes sense? So that's the brand for Target. When you think of Target, what do you think about their brand is? Is the brand mass merchandising or is the brand affordably hip stuff? If you think that it's mass merchandising, you have a problem because you're now in competition with a bazillion other people. If however, you think that it's affordably hip stuff, then if you're a marketing person, when people call Target, Target, you're happy, right? You've effectively created a brand that separates itself. So when I'm driving down the road and I have to get paper towels, I can buy the exact same paper towels at Walmart as I can Target at the same price. Why do I go to Target? Absolutely. I also wanna convince myself that I'm affordably hip, right? So think about it. When I teach branding at grad school, the people that are the best in the world at branding, if you think about it, are bottled water companies. Why? It's the same damn stuff. Every bottle of water is this, now I'm not a water marketing executive, but you're selling water, right? So, does anybody know the water boss? Really slick design, really? Okay, everybody know the water deer park? Everybody know the water pariet? It is water. But those three things are very different. If you are wanting to host a gathering of really cool hip artistic folks to have a conversation, guess what kind of water you're gonna want at the table? If you're gonna pitch a million dollar donor on some sort of big idea, what kind of water are you gonna want at the table? Pariet, right? If you're gonna go to somebody and you're gonna try to tell them that you're having budget meetings and you're having difficult ones, and you're thinking of austerity, you have deer park at the table, right? These are our brands. They were manufactured for us. So the customer, you need to know about who they are. How many here really know about their customers? Think about it. You need to know what their wants, their needs, their desires, their attitudes, their barriers, how you can benefit them, how you solve a problem, and what if any position does your image conjure in their mind? How many people are in active daily conversations with their customers? How many people is their active daily conversation with their customers, their box office, but not their marketing department? Okay, maybe this is not a problem that in every company that I've worked for, the people that are in constant conversation with the customer is the box office. And if you're not getting daily reports of what your customers are saying to the people in your marketing department who are making decisions on messaging, you've got a problem, right? Because you're not getting to a place where you're actually getting accurate information. So, when you're looking at marketing to new folks, and I'll never forget, when I came into the marketing department at arena, the world was sort of changing on the subscription front. It used to be that you printed one brochure, and in our case, we were printing 300,000 copies of one brochure, and we were mailing it all over the place. And if you didn't respond to our first wave of mailing the brochure, we're gonna mail you another one. And if you didn't respond on the second wave, we're gonna mail you the exact same brochure our third time, right? So we sort of, our proposition in that moment was sort of sales by submission. You've gotta start thinking about your audiences in terms of segments, and sometimes this is popular, sometimes this isn't popular, because if you think about how you might segment an audience, there's a variety of different ways that you can do it. But if you're trying to send the same message to everybody, you're not gonna be successful. So, you can market to all of the people some of the time, and some of the people all of the time, but you can't effectively market to all of the people all of the time with the same message. It's about getting the right offer in front of the right person at the right time. So now, when I left arena, and I'm actually doing a very similar thing now with Milwaukee Repertory Theater, we don't really have one primary brochure, or we do, but we don't print a lot of them. Instead, we segment our audiences. Do you like musicals? Do you like plays? Do you like new works? Do you like whatever it is? And we start designing packages and offers specifically based upon your interactions with our organization. Segmentation is a means of saying something to somebody, rather than nothing to everybody. Does that make sense? Okay. Particularly as we get more and more advanced in technology, people, you should know who your individual customers are. If this was a group of my customers, I should know why you are different than you. And how I speak to you is gonna be different than how I speak to you, right? You might be interested in symphonic work, you might be interested in dance work. You've gotta figure out who these individual people are and how to speak to them. Look at identifying characteristics, traits that put people into categories. You need to look at demographics, geography, usage behavior, attitudes, belief, future interests. All the time I say geography, and I've looked in two different markets now where geography was incredibly important. Early in my career, right out of grad school, I worked in Los Angeles. And the most important marketing study ever that landed on my desk was that if you were not lived within five miles of a theater, 99% of the time you're not gonna go. Why? Because the traffic in Los Angeles is horrific. And to get somebody to drive beyond five miles was like you might as well ask them to get on a plane and fly to New York, right? In Washington, D.C. It's an area where there's three distinct geographies. You have Maryland, you have Virginia, and you have the district. People in Maryland don't like to go to Virginia, people in Virginia don't like to go to Maryland, people in the district don't like to go anywhere, right? You're talking to very different things. So when we at arena moved our operations literally one and a half miles because we were building a new theater company. But we went over the Potomac River and into Virginia. It was a huge thing because our Marylanders actually thought they needed a passport to get to Virginia. So geography can determine a lot of things. We know a lot about demographics. We know a lot about usage and behavior because you have CRM systems like Tessitura that can track behavior. So you know where people are purchasing, how they're purchasing, and all that sort of data. In fact, these days we're actually getting to a place where our systems are smarter than we are and we don't have the time and resource to analyze everything that's at our fingertips, right? You have attitude, beliefs, or opinions, and you have future interests and intentions. You need to start looking at your current audiences. How you speak to your one-time attenders versus your multi-attenders has to be different. You need to think about how you're speaking to your subscribers and your members versus how you're speaking to your group attendees. Your donors versus non-donors. When you look at customer segments, you need to look at your percentage of the audience versus the percentage of the audience in the cities. And I'll tell you, this is one of the things right now that we're working very hard on in Milwaukee. Milwaukee County is 47% African-American. Our theater is not 47% African-American. So if you look at our percentage of audiences, and let's say your audience percentage was 25% African-American and your city percentage was 47% African-American, guess what? You have a really, really good opportunity for growth in the African-American community. If you have 60% of your audience is above the age 65, and the population in the city is 30%, you have saturated that market, which means you probably shouldn't invest more money in there, because it's not a growth phase for you. Does that make sense? You can get all of this data from the census. The census is sort of the wonderful information dump of what's going on in your geography. If you're not looking specifically at your census every single year or any sort of studies about what's going on in your city every single year on demographics, you need to. So with existing audiences, what are you trying to get them to do? Well, you're trying to get them to tend more often, right? So if they come to two things a year, you're trying to get them to come to five things a year. You're trying to get them to try different things. So if they're your musical audience, maybe you're trying to get them to come see your symphonies. And you're trying to have increased their quality of experience. So these are the things that you're messaging to them on a daily basis, sometimes. New audiences. Some of the, sometimes what you wanna do is you wanna model what your current audience base is because birds of a feather flock together, right? So if you can do analysis on what your current audience looks like, that should be an indicator of what are key metrics when you're looking for it for a new potential audience, right? For example, if you're heavy in a certain zip code, you need to find out more about that zip code. It might tell you a little bit more about your customer base. However, when you're changing programming specifically, like I went back and I said, if your theater company has 20% of the audience as African-American, but 47% is in the county, and going back to what I said originally, which was, out of the four piece of marketing, the most important thing is product. The first thing you have to do is if you're attracting a new audiences, they have to see on the stage what they look like. So if you're looking for younger audiences and you're doing nothing but plays that are not attracted to young audiences, you might as well give up. Young audiences wanna see young people on the stage too and they wanna have a product for them. So if you're getting into places where you're trying to attract specific groups, younger audiences, different ethnicities, different socioeconomic statuses, then you need to get beyond how you're marketing to your current audience spaces because that's probably not gonna work with the future audience space. Customer data, you need to get demographics, names, addresses, phone numbers, even from single ticket buyers. The biggest mistake that I see with companies from a marketing perspective is that particularly when they get into last minute sales, they don't capture contact information. I always get into fights. This is why I'll never manage a marketing operation if I don't also manage the box office because I always get into operational issues with the box office because they're trying to sell tickets and they don't care about collecting information. They just wanna quick transaction. If you don't have your information, there is no possible way that you're ever gonna speak to them again, right? So it's key. It's key to what you're trying to do. So even if it takes you an extra five seconds, get that information or you're also never gonna be able to speak to those people again and then you're gonna continue spending way too much money on acquiring a new audience that you're never gonna be able to get back to you. You need to get competitive data. So remember I talked earlier about, yes, we all like to think that we're working together as nonprofits in a very beneficial way for the entire city. You're also in competition. And in some cases, the easiest thing to think about is if you're a theater company, you might be in competition with other theater companies in the community. But more today than ever before, your competition is not other theater companies. It's not other arts organizations. Your competition, as I said earlier, is Amazon Prime. You need to convince somebody to get off of their couch and into your theater, right? I'll tell you, the weirdest thing for me, I love sort of moving to different cities because you learn so much new things about marketing. I am in competition on a weekly basis with the Green Bay Packers. It is so strange to me. If the Packers are in a playoff game, forget about it. The whole state shuts down, right? So when I'm thinking about who I'm competing against for a Sunday matinee, in DC, the Sunday matinee was, I'd sell it out months in advance in Wisconsin, I can't beg somebody to attend during a Green Bay game, right? So you have to figure out what's your competition? Successful marketing looks beyond you. So we talked about looking within the company. This is getting information about your audiences. But you also have to start thinking about the competitive framework beyond the company. This is what you're in competition with and you have to define it. Beyond that, you have to look at prospect traits, right? So what are you trying to get at when you're looking at new audiences? Are you trying to get younger audiences? Are you trying to get more diverse audiences? What are those traits that you're going after? Then you have to start looking at environmental trends. This is really important. So like I said earlier, if you're not getting reports from APAP or whatever it is, it's your service organization, you're not studying what's going on. So I'll just say, I think it's not two years ago, that the last updated from the NEA was public participation in the arts statistics. And it was alarming in theater because traditionally what happens is you look at the public participation in the arts and theater is fine. Traditionally, symphonies are tanking and operas are tanking and theater is perfectly fine. This last time theater had the greatest loss of any of the art forms. And it wasn't just theater specifically, it was plays. Musicals were taking off and plays were tanking. So if the greatest indicator of how your company is doing is national trends in the ecosystem, then you've got to pay attention to that, right? There might not be anything that you can do immediately, but you at least need to be aware. So what can you learn about your industry? What can you learn about your audiences? And how do you apply these to your marketing statistics? The industry is pretty easy. There's lots of organizations out there that'll tell you things about industry. So your specific industry organizations, the National Endowment for the Arts, Americans of the Arts with their Arts and Economic Prosperity Studies. There's a lot of information out there that tells you what's going on. But you also need to think about how your audiences are comparing to the averages. So if you're not benchmarking what's happening now against peer companies, you probably should. How many people do that? How many people in here benchmark key metrics against peer organizations? I have to do it every six months for my organization. And when I was at arena, I was benchmarking key metrics quarterly, right? If you don't know where you're going or how to measure it, you're never gonna know if you're having success. So if theaters nationally, I mean, here, I'll just give you an example. I was meeting with a very large funder on Friday here in New York. And she said to me, you know, I'm kind of concerned that your subscription base only increased by 300 subscribers this year, Chad. I said, okay. And earlier in the day, I was actually meeting with a different funder who was much more knowledgeable about subscription bases. I said, are you aware that 94% of subscription bases in TCG companies are decreasing at this moment? So holding steady is the new growth. So you should be ecstatic. I was ecstatic about that. So this is a trend and you need to figure out how you're benchmarking. Now, if an average company is losing a subscription base by 4% and you're losing your subscription base at 20, you've got a problem, right? Okay, how to get information. Like I said before, the US Census Bureau, Economic Development Agencies, research organizations will all supply it. Industry studies. You need to just start doing your own research and this doesn't have to be time consuming. So if you, the biggest mistake that people do when they first start tracking information is they try to start tracking 30 different data metrics. You really just need to figure out what are your top three or four? What are the three or four things that you need to start looking at? Your renewal rate. Other things like that. And you can actually just go out and put out a simple survey, right? And track something. Right now, one of the things that were really important to us at Milwaukee Rep is tracking the diversity of our audiences. We're not asking them a bazillion different things, but that's one of the things that we're really looking at. You can also analyze your list. There are things like in your data, if you have a database, you can send your list on to like Experian or a data house and they can tell you with pretty good accuracy a bazillion different things about your database. Why? If you think about it, and this is what I'm sort of, every time that somebody tries to give me a loyalty card, I say no to it because I buy that information. I know what's going on. I know I can buy at any time in this group how many loaves of bread you purchase on a weekly basis. Why? Because I'm pretty sure you have a loyalty card when it comes to grocery stores, right? So these data houses, they have all the information. So if you're looking for very specific things, you might just be able to ship it off to them and for a penny per contact, they can tell you the information that you're looking for. How do you interpret the data? You're gonna have many findings from many different sources and you're gonna have to figure out the through line in it. You need to look for a store. You need to look for commonalities, right? You're gonna see if you get four different studies, they're gonna tell you different percentages on different things, but there should be a common link between them on what overall is happening and being curious and inquisitive. So in demographic trends, just checking my clock here, in demographic trends, you're looking at a pretty quick exodus into the suburbs for younger folks, but interestingly enough, this is actually happening quite a bit in Milwaukee. Older companies are moving right back into the city. Boomer retirees are creating new population centers in somewhat unusual places. I was just reading a study, literally two or three days ago, that said that Oklahoma City, Oklahoma was where it was at. I'm from Missouri. I would have never thought that Oklahoma City would be the new hotspot for retirees. Generation Xers and younger experiences demand unique experiences and they demand it when they want it. You're talking about people and I'm on the younger age group of Gen Xers and I can actually remember a time though vaguely when the internet didn't exist. I'm the last of those people, right? Now you're talking about people. I have a four-year-old nephew that it's so scary to me. I'm only 35 and I go to him and he's gonna tell me how to operate the iPad, right? That's scary. These are folks that have every single thing that they want at their fingertips whenever they want it. That's gonna change our business models in the future. They expect to get their information from new media. Here's the interesting thing about the public participation in the art studies. They've been saying, they've been tracking passive reception of art, right? You buy a ticket, you sit in a chair, you watch your performance. Up until very recently, they were not tracking participation via YouTube or co-creation or anything like that. Gen X and Gen Y, they're not, particularly Gen Y and millennials, they're not gonna wanna be where they're just passively receiving anything. They wanna co-create. They wanna actually be part of the process. And the moment that the baby boomer generation is the less dominant of the demographics in your audience and Gen X and millennials are the more dominant, the way we do our business is gonna shift tremendously. And it's one of the things that actually scares me a little bit because we are all designed in our business models to be passive creators of art. And we're gonna have to figure out ways of being interactive collaborators with our audiences. And I don't have a good, I don't have a good suggestion yet on that. But if you look, these are the percentage of change by age. 55 to 69 is gonna be the predominant source for at least the next five to 10 years, right? These are the baby boomers, we just talked about them. We talked a little bit about millennials, about how they're multi-taskers. These are folks that are doing five different things at once and they've always done five different things at once. It's just the way that they've always been. Diversity and difference. There will not be a majority of anything in the country in any city very soon, right? So if you're like, and this is what I said back to Milwaukee. Regional theaters are on the edge of becoming irrelevant. If they don't find a way to diversify their audience spaces, right? It used to be that we can serve a very small purpose of a very homogeneous set of people, whether or not we want to or not, and that was fine from a business perspective. I'm not talking about from a mission perspective, but from a business perspective, it funded the financial models. It will not in the future. So if you continually are doing things that are not attractive to diversified audiences, I guarantee you in 10 to 20 years, you will be out of business. Non-white spending power. These are some old datas and I'll go back and take a look at them, but you could see where it's at. Redefinition of family. What we think of family is different. Think about the family unit is different. I myself am a married gay. So I went from Washington, D.C. where I was married into Wisconsin where I wasn't and now I am again. So I've been divorced and married four times in two years. But think about it and how it influences your concept of families. You're seeing this now. A whole bunch of advertisers are changing the way they're advertising, depending upon who, was it Cheerios? They just recently put out a brilliant series of marketing where you have a guy that's heavily tattooed and a prim and proper life and they're like, this is wholesome. And then you have a gay couple, this is wholesome. And you have this, that's different messaging of what the family unit looks like. For five years ago, you wouldn't even see it. Economic trends. Government funding is down. Corporate funding is maintaining barely in a lot of areas. Individual giving has been put on the squeeze. You're in competition with social services. So these are all things you should be thinking about right now. Philanthropy and sponsorship is confusing. At Arena, when I first came into the company, corporate philanthropy was in development. Sponsorship was in development. Then it was moved to marketing. Then it was moved back to development. Then it was moved back to marketing. Why? Nobody can figure out. Primarily, if you're in a corporate philanthropy position and it is a sponsorship, you are talking to a chief marketing officer. You're not talking to a head of a foundation. And they don't care about philanthropic reasons for giving. They care about what it is that you can provide them. So at least in a lot of organizations, what they're finding is, is that they're partnering with a lot of banks because they're looking for affluent audiences which arts organizations can provide. That's a marketing decision. That's not a development decision. Look at your audience research. You've talked about that. You need to define the experience. You've got to go beyond the actual encounter of the arts. So I'm hyper aware of the situation because I mentioned before, when I first joined arena, we were dropping our operations, moving it to a different state for two years. And I spent, God, probably four or five months tailoring individualized websites for all of our subscribers that gave them their own directions from their house to the new theaters step by step for every individual subscriber. Why? If they got lost in their first experience to our new theater, they would never come back again. That is a marketing issue. I just went to a Broadway show last night and it was like 16 degrees outside and it felt like it was negative 50. And these old theaters do not have lobbies. So you're standing outside and you have front of house people that are refusing to let people into the theater when it's 16 degrees outside. That is a marketing problem. Why? Because if I have to stand outside for 30 minutes in 16 degree weather just to get in to see your show, you've got a problem. I'm not gonna do it again. I'm pretty sure I got frostbite. Okay? Identify what you can control. And this goes back to place. If you think about, if you're trying to attract a younger audience who's always been connected and has never been disconnected in their life, if the first thing they do and they walk in as they see a volunteer usher who's 85 years old and who yells at them to turn off their cell phone, do you have an inviting place for those people? You've got to tell them what the total benefit is, minus the total cost and that is the value to the consumer. If the cost is greater than the benefit, you'll see shrinking audiences. Here's the new benefits. We talked about this. Stimulation, freedom of escape, exposure, connection, expression, a special occasion, these are all benefits, right? A family activity, edutainment. Are you communicating these things? Because that's why people are buying. Barriers. Are they unfamiliar with the neighborhood? I'll tell you, when we first moved our operations, our temporary operations at Arena from downtown Southwest to Eustree Corridor, the Eustree Corridor for several decades was considered an unsafe neighborhood, right? Oddly enough, with the time that we ended up making that move, it was one of the hottest neighborhoods in the city. I couldn't afford to live there and yet I had to convince all of our customer base that Eustree was fine, right? So it was a barrier, little awareness of options, feeling like an outsider. Opera has a big problem with that. When I was at Santa Fe Opera, every single time I was a major gifts officer, but every single night I had to go to the opera in a tuxedo. Do consumers want to see somebody that's in a tuxedo every night? Or does it make them feel like an outsider? Light users are casual consumers. The number one metric on whether or not you would not subscribe at Arena Stage was if you had children under the age of 14 in the household. And we spent a lot of money trying to get those people to subscribe. We've got babysitters for them, we did it all. And guess what? None of it happened. And the time I had not gotten to the point in my life where I was considering a family, I was 29, 30. Now I'm 35 and everybody around me has families and I understand it. They're exhausted, right? And guess what? If you get them before the time that they have children, you'll get them back. They'll come back to you. But you're not gonna get them for that time that they have young children in the household. Don't spend the money there. It's not gonna happen. So for the light users, they wanna have fun. They wanna have entertainment. They wanna be accessible, right? Oh, it's out of control. Okay, good. They're looking for an experience, right? When you look at your competitive analysis, you need to take a look at what's the major features in the external environment. Types of competition, we've talked about this. Direct competition to similar art forms. Possible substitutes for other leisure options. We are not by nature a cheap option, right? You need to take a look at all competition for leisure dollars. Compare yourself to at least two direct competitors and at least one likely substitute. What are they doing better than you? We didn't, we took a, when we moved all of our customer base to different areas at arena. We weren't focused on customer service, but we had to be focused on customer service. So we did things, unusual things. I went to a double tree hotel one time and I checked in and they gave me a hot cookie. Guess what? For two years in our Virginia based location, we gave everybody cookies. We gave everybody free coffee. We were inconveniencing them enough that we had to be different. We had to be more welcoming. We accepted a say yes to the customer policy, right? So think about what it is that your competitors are doing and how you can be better. Because guess what? If you're in a major metropolitan area, there's somebody in your city that's doing pretty similar work and you've got to differentiate yourself. You need to compare a whole bunch of things. Annual revenue, revenue sources, growth and decline, geographic reasons, products, seasons, all of these things to get a full picture of what your competitors are doing. We do pricing studies, venue studies, customer service studies. We have secret shoppers. You know, we have secret shoppers in the DC market. Signature theater spokes would come to our theater and I would get a report. We would send stuff to signature theater and they would get a report. Why? Because I want to know exactly what's going on in the consumer side of things, right? Competitive advantages. These are the benefits that you offer that they don't. Competitive weaknesses. These are the benefits they offer that you don't. You have to look through your competition through the customer's eyes. It's kind of like, you know, I started my career when I was in grad school as a kindergarten teacher and my undergraduate degree is in education. And I always dealt with two sets of parents. One set was my little Johnny walks on water. He could never bite anybody. And the other one was like, oh yeah, I love my Johnny, but he's a biter, right? You've got to be open enough to say, here's my weaknesses and in fact, you have some biters in your organization. And this is how you do this. You've got to do a SWOT analysis and I'll just put it on the table. I've done a lot of SWOT analysises for companies that I've worked for and for companies that hired me as a consultant. And if somebody doesn't cry during the process, you haven't done it right. I only say that because you have to be beyond polite. And it doesn't mean that you have to be nasty about it, but if you have weaknesses, you have to be able to openly talk about that and it's gonna hurt some feelings, right? I got to a place when I left arena that I was there for long enough where people were judging decisions that I had made. Previously before I had only been in organizations for three or four years and so nobody came in and said there wasn't enough outcome yet. When I left arena, there were some decisions that I made that were very, very good and there were some decisions that I made that were pretty poor. And you had to be honest about it or else the company couldn't grow, right? So when you take a look at internal factors, you're looking internally to your company. You're looking for strengths. You're looking for weaknesses. Externally, you're looking for opportunities and you're looking for threats. So you use a SWAT analysis to unearth important issues and brainstorm and get input from others in your organizations. So when you're doing an analysis, the S, the strength, you wanna define what are the most important things internally to your organization that you're strong at. The W for weaknesses, you wanna define the things that internally to your organization, you're bad at, right? Opportunity is in the external environment. What opportunities are coming along that's gonna help you to grow? So for example, if you're looking for a target demographic of an audience that's growing, but you're currently not good at it, that's an opportunity. So for threat, threat is what's happening in the external environment that is a threat to you. Does everybody understand the difference between internal and external? The marketing piece guide this analysis. So this is where I want to dive a little bit into the piece. So you have product, price, place, promotion, people and positioning. What is product? This should be relatively easy. What is product? What you're putting on, right? But it's not that easy. I'll tell you why it's not that easy. When we opened the new building and arena, we had a bazillion different products that I never, ever, ever thought that I'd be working on. I never thought that I'd be running a restaurant. And now at Milwaukee Rep, I run a restaurant as well. What you get when you're served a meal is a product. I never thought that I'd be running a parking garage, but if you mess up somebody's parking, that's a big problem. That is a product. Think of it, and this goes kind of into place too, but if you don't have good bathrooms for women, you've got a huge problem, because 65% of your audience statistically will be women. Price. Price, you've been taught probably in school the supply and demand curve, right? And price is what regulates this supply and demand curve. So if you're thinking about trying to attract different people or your audience base, you have to start thinking about pricing, right? And if you want to encourage specific behavior, you better think about how you price things. So for example, we were having a subscription problem at arena, and one of the things I looked at pretty early in the process was if there was any unsold seat in the theater, somebody could come at the last minute buy a 50% discount and get that unsold seat. We have Pavlovianly trained really poor behavior, right? So think about how you're pricing things. If somebody can get a good seat at the very last minute at a big discount, don't be mad about that. You caused that, so you better change it. So now, at least when I left at arena, what they were doing was they were doing a pay your age program starting two months in advance. So for people that are 40 and under, instead of a last minute rush program. Because what happened was, you started them to train people to buy in advance. They were buying on average tickets that cost about $35. So when you came back later, and when they turned 40, you were pitching them on a subscription, you pitched them on a subscription that was three players for $120, $40 price. And they know what they were already, they already got into a pattern of buying in advance, right? You will never be able to sell a subscription to an audience base that you have trained to wait until the very last moment. So think about that. Pricing, I mean, I could speak about pricing for like weeks and weeks, that's what I love the most. But it is a psychological exchange, right? You have to think about what it is that you're incentivizing, because you will get what it is that you're incentivizing. Think about place. Think about place. Is it welcoming? Is it open? Are you communicating what you want to communicate? So again, I gave an example about ushers in a theater. That's a huge place thing. More often than not, I did have some work three or four years ago for the Folger Shakespeare Library in D.S.C. They thought that their place was the Folger Shakespeare Library, where people would come to the library and look at the portfolios. Actually, they saw 80% of their visitors online. They were digitizing the portfolios, right? And everything is in their collection. And 80% of our customer base was online. Their place was not their building. Their place was online. So you have to think about where you're serving your customers. And then how you're promoting to people. And this is where we spend a lot of our time. How are you promoting? Any questions there? So, types of opportunities. Are you looking at growing markets? Are you looking at unique niches? Are you looking at virgin territory? Geographic expansion? These are all opportunities. Trends, new audience segments. Types of threats. Growing competitors, economic downturns, community changes. The interesting thing that I'm learning right now, at least in terms of community, is that Washington, D.C. when I was there, was in a huge growth phase. I now live in a city that's not in a huge growth phase. It's actually a phenomenal city. And it is growing, but nowhere near at the rate of Washington, D.C. was. So that's an economic constraint. Changes in funding patterns. And then you've got to define where it is that you want to go. And remember, where it is that you want to go has to be measurable, attainable, and financially viable. So a good objective, you're gonna have a target group named. I want to do X for this group of people. It will have a verb, what it is that you want to do. And it's gonna have a numeric goal. So if you just want to say, I want to bring in more young people, okay? If you say, I want 30% of our mainstream audiences for our largest theater to be folks under the age of 35, by 2020, that is a much better objective. Bad objective, increased participation in earned income from ABC Museum. Good objective, to increase urban audiences at the dance company's performances by 30% by this season. Make sense? So strategies to do that are in your four P's. Do you change product? Do you change prices? Do you change what you're doing with place? I will tell you, I'm finding an interesting thing about place right now. And this is well written about. But Milwaukee, Wisconsin, besides it being a phenomenal city from a bazillion other different ways, one of its strategic challenges is that it's the number one segregated city in the United States. I didn't know that before I moved to Wisconsin. And it's literally street by street. We used to do production of the color purple. And we had to go into the community before they could come to us. So we actually held rehearsals in historically black churches, right? So think about place. Place is important because if you're gonna wanna have an authentic interaction with a target market, you need to think about going to them as well as them coming to you. What kind of products are you offering? When are you offering them? Where are you offering them? You think about creative place making now? That's what it's talking about. Going into, instead of asking and forcing people to come to your Taj Mahal, you go to them. Something to think about. Is there more than one way to make your product more appealing? Pricing, how much does it cost to participate? Not just in terms of money, but here's the interesting thing. When you have a show that isn't selling well and an artistic director or somebody comes to you and says we gotta fill these houses, give away comp tickets. Do you know how hard it is to give away comp tickets to a show that nobody's interested in? You know why? Time is a currency, right? People, I haven't been to Broadway in two years because I was shifting jobs. I'm amazed by the prices in out of Broadway. It's been, it's hugely different in two years. I can't get a ticket anywhere in the house for anything less than 120 bucks, right? They're obviously getting that from a monetary perspective. What they're not maybe considering is the time perspective. So you might have audiences that are, I'll just give you an example for TKTS and TDF is I think a really great organization, but from a time perspective, and there could be a wide, a ton of reasons that I don't know why they've made this decision. But if you wanna get a ticket to a matinee, you go from 10 till three. Then they put the tickets for the evening shows from three to eight. What if you wanna see a matinee in an evening show? You can't get a ticket to an evening show because you're in your matinee, right? And then you have to run back and I don't have enough time to do that. I didn't have enough time yesterday to do it. So I ended up purchasing the ticket not from TDF for the evening show. It was a time issue, right? How easy is parking, dining and other amenities? How is your customer service? This is not a, I was reading an article in the, I think it was the Wall Street Journal the other day about how airlines have now consolidated their operations and they actually make strategic decisions on providing worse customer service so that then you buy an upgrade to be able to get the normal things that you did a year ago. We are not an essential service like an airline, right? So our customer service, I would argue, has to be better than almost anybody because we are a luxury item. Place, is it comfortable and attractive? Does it make the most of your identity? Is it difficult to reach? There is a theater company in Washington, D.C. that I find a little fascinating. A signature theater company, I think, does really phenomenal work and their managing directors are a very good friend of mine but they are not on a metro. They're not on a metro stop. So I've always said this to her and I don't know if she's ever, she's ever moved with it but if I were the marketing person there I would start figuring out before I marketed who owns a car because if you're marketing to people that do not own a car in the household, you're gonna have a problem with them coming to signature because they're not on a public, they're on a bus stop but they're not on a metro stop, right? So I would think for them, I haven't done, obviously I haven't done the analysis but I would think for them having access to private transportation instead of public transportation is pretty indicative of whether or not people are going to go to their venue and that's a police issue. And they just happen to be located in a place called Sherlington which is a lovely, lovely place and it's got lots of restaurants and it's great but from a metro perspective isn't accessible. So what are we saying about ourselves when we promote? What are the communications tactics that we're using? What have worked the least or best? How many people have due analysis after they do a campaign on what has worked or what hasn't? When you do a direct mailing, how do you track rates? Do you track those sorts of things? The reason why advertising folks love to use digital advertising these days is that because you can attract, you can get information on anything, right? When I was working with the Washington Post we had six different advertisements and there were six different versions for the same show and it would learn which ad worked best for which demographic. It would know that ad D was best for women under the age of 45 that lived in Virginia and it would serve that ad to them, right? So in a digital sphere, you can track almost anything because they have these nasty tracking cookies that will follow everything, right? In a print advertising perspective it's much more difficult. You don't know exactly what's driving the purchase because there isn't a click through, right? Are you budgeting enough for marketing to be effective? How many people are tracking? This is one of the things in the marketing perspective you do need to track is cost of sale or return on investment. One of the challenges that we have at Milwaukee Repertory Theater right now is that the average regional theater spends 30 cents on the dollar for marketing. What the rep spends is 12 cents. Why is that a big problem? I always get in a fight with, with, if you haven't been able to tell, I'm pretty feisty, with marketing folks because at the end of the year they came back to me and they would say, look Chad, I've been really diligent, I've been great. I saved the money, I saved $25,000 that I didn't use this year. And I was like, holy shit, I need you to use that money. Because for every dollar you spend you should be giving me six, right? Now you can tell me, I didn't wanna spend this dollar on this show because this show isn't selling. I get that. But then you need to spend that dollar on a show that's selling very, very, very well. Oftentimes what happens is you get a show that's selling well and what the marketing director does is they pull back so that they could spend the money on other shows in the future. Why would you ever spend more marketing dollars on a show that just, just because the way the world works just isn't connecting with audiences? I mean again, I told you when we first started this conversation that I would say some controversial things and you can fight with me if you'd like, but this isn't a world where all the children are pretty. This is a world where your job is to maximize return on investment, right? And to be able to do things that are more challenging for the company in the future, you better maximize your opportunity for things that are selling really well. So if you have a show that's taking off, don't cut its marketing budget, triple it. If you're getting a dollar, if you're getting a $20 to one return on investment why would you not invest more? Think about your own investments. Would you go to an investment advisor and say, please put me into the fund that's giving me a negative return on investment, move my money out of the ones that's positive and put it into the negative please. So why do we do it? So you gotta be tracking return on investment. Are we capturing data to know what's working or what's not? Who's gonna do what, when, and where? So I'm a big, big believer in planning. In fact, I kinda drive some of my marketing teams nuts because I've got the hit by the bus rule. If your marketing director is hit by a bus today, you should be able to effectively implement every single plan for the next nine months. It's gonna take you nine months to hire a new person, not to mention planning for the wake, you know. But you have to have everything tailored. On this day, I'm gonna do this and this is how much money I'm gonna spend and this is who's designing and this is the firm and this is here and this is here and this is here. Everything planned out. The more complicated your operations are, the better your planning has to be. At the Rep, we get into a situation where we produce 630 performances of 12 plays in nine months. If our planning isn't done by August 30th when our season starts, good luck because we're not gonna have time to do it. It's like being shot of a cannon. So from June to August, we concentrate on planning. Does it make sense? And everybody in your organization should know who's doing what, when, and why. Your development department should know exactly what the marketing department's doing. Your artistic department should know exactly what the marketing department's doing because if it isn't selling well and they're nervous that you're not doing anything, they should know. And remember, time, money, people. And I don't have a great solution for this, but where I struggle now is I've got a pot of money. I'm not afraid to spend it. But do I spend it on buying more advertising or more people? I haven't figured that one out yet. People cost money, ads cost money, it all costs money. The real answer is the return on investment, right? A good action plan will be highly detailed, agreed upon by all, but I will just put a caveat here. I believe in consensus building to a point. I also believe that whoever is running your marketing operations has the final say on marketing. So if you're trying to design your season brochure by a committee, Lord help you first of all because nobody's gonna like the fonts and that is just not. At the end of the day, somebody's gotta decide. So as much as you're trying to get agreement upon everybody because that is what you're trying to do is it'll be more effective. At some moment somebody has to make a decision. So if it's gonna push you off schedule, make a decision. And plan for a contingency. How do you know it's working? You're gonna have results tracked up by data. You're gonna have a timeframe and you're gonna have reporting. And we're at the end. So there's my email address. I respond to email pretty well. So if you get back to your organizations and you're like, what in the world is he talking about? Send me an email and hopefully I'll have a good answer for you. If not, I'll make one up. I think we might have five minutes. Do we have any questions that were not addressed during this? Have I stunned you all into silence? Have I bored you? There's some really tough markets in the United States that I know about. Particularly from a presenting perspective. Minneapolis is one. They've got a large presenting house in St. Paul. They've got a large presenting house in Minneapolis and they're competing over the same product. Southern Florida is one as well. So you have to find what you said differentiates because you're gonna be presenting similar products. So what's gonna be the difference? How are you gonna get somebody from Minneapolis to drive to St. Paul to see something? Maybe it is your customer service. Maybe it is some sort of experience that they're gonna have with you. Maybe they get access to the artistic product that the other organization isn't. I don't know. You've gotta find whatever it is that differentiates you because that's what's gonna sell. And you're right there. Any other questions? Great. Sorry. I think it's... You know, it was something that we were trying to experiment with at arena. Actually, Willie Mammoth did an experiment before we did. I think it's a fad and I think it's over. That's my opinion. There's lots of other people I think. I think that this is just me, but I think that you should provide Wi-Fi and other things in your building so that intermission and after the show people can immediately connect. I also think right now, like when I take vacations, I almost exclusively took vacations on cruise ships. Why? Because nobody could call me, right? And I think that there's some sort of beautiful experience of powering everything down to pay attention to what's in front of you. And I actually think that's going to be a competitive advantage in the future. Being able to disconnect rather than stay connected for a time period. So I don't like them. But I also don't have a lot of experience in that area. So I... Yeah, I'll tell you a really interesting situation that I walked right into at the Smithsonian. They specifically recruited somebody from the performing arts world, not the visual world, when they hired me. And the national... I can't even... The American art or it was American... I can't... One of the big museums was doing a video game exhibition. And the curator, to get the video games in, went out and they crowdsourced. They said something like, four or 500,000 responses worldwide on what are the best video games in the world. That caused a huge problem internally. Because if you can imagine, there's a conflict now because the curators have 30 years experience and five PhDs and four Nobel prizes and the commoner is picking the product. And so I think you're gonna see much more of that. I think you're gonna see a place where galleries are gonna co-curate more than have the expert. And I think not to get into a lot of philosophy, but I think we got into ourselves into a situation where when the market turned in 2008, everybody in the country were burned by so-called experts. The experts told us that the banking system was healthy and everything was healthy and guess what, it wasn't. And so we have a distrust now. So instead of going to an expert, and this is just my personal view, like a reviewer or something like that, what people are doing now is that they're turning to word of mouth. And we think about how it is when we don't know about something, we go to Wikipedia. That's not written by an expert. That's content created by us. So I think that's gonna continue. I think what you see is gonna be continued. And I don't know how it's gonna play out because the old school model in regional theaters, the old school model in performing arts centers was the visionary sets everything. And that's gonna have to give way at some moment to we're in this together with our audiences and we set together. I think it's gonna be in programming. And I think the next generation of artistic leadership is already grappling with us right now. There's a big debate about in 2011, Doug McClellan on Arts Journal asked me in a group of 18 or 19 other writers to talk about artistic leadership, whether we should follow our audiences or whether we should lead them. And I think that there's really powerful arguments we've made by both because Steve Jobs once said, I don't go to focus groups because how do people know what they want until I tell them what they want? I think there's a powerful argument in that. The other part is we have to be receptive to what the community needs if you're developing artistic work for them. But the scary part about that, and that's how for-profit businesses are always the mentality to teach you in business school, but as mission-driven organizations, what happens if you're in a field where the standard patron doesn't like your genre? I mean, that's why opera companies are getting into musicals right now. That's sort of scary. I mean, so if we made every artistic decision based upon user-generated comments, which from the marketing side of things, I think that's a great way to go. But you might not have an opera audience here in 50 years. So it is fun. Any other quick questions before? Okay, thank you guys. Appreciate it.