Download Contemporary strategic marketing communications practices for arts

Premier's ABN AMRO Business Studies, Economics Scholarship
Contemporary strategic marketing
communications practices for arts
and not-for-profit organisations
Peter Bryant
TAFE NSW–South Western Sydney Institute, Granville College
Sponsored by
Objectives
Broad statement of purpose
The aim of this study was to identify contemporary strategic marketing communications
practices and the application of contemporary strategic marketing communications
theory to the workplace, specifically to arts and not-for-profit organisations.
Specific objectives

Develop an understanding of how existing strategic marketing communications
theory is applied in the workplace in the United States and then compare it with its
application in Australia.

Identify emerging theories of strategic marketing communications and integrate them
into the delivery of both mainstream and commercial courses.

Develop case studies that may be used in either assessment or delivery of
contemporary strategic marketing communications competencies.
The development of these objectives into more specific research targets occurred as the
interviews progressed, and from my initial target of 5 interviews I ended with 18 different
case studies in a variety of contexts. The most fascinating aspect of this evolution process
was the exploration of the differences and similarities between the United States and
Australia. Through the course of the interviews, issues such as intense competition for
funding in the area of education for marketing programs in the arts, a lack of literacy in
these skills and a distrust of some of the newer and more commercial marketing
communications strategies found common ground with experiences in New South
Wales, yet other issues demonstrated the cultural and funding gap between the United
States and Australia.
The learning
The concept of strategic marketing communications is a complicated one. Through the
course of the program conducted by Northwestern University (Kellogg School of
Business), the definition of marketing communications was the centre of much debate,
especially as many of the participants were from senior corporate backgrounds. The
contradictions of definition ranged from marketing communications being simply a
matter of branding (Shell and its Helix brand of oil), through to an adjunct of the sales
and advertising processes (Pfizer animal products) through to a way to translate a
uniquely South American way of thinking and communicating to a burgeoning American
beer mark (Bolivia’s national brewer).
For the purposes of my study, I chose to use the definition provided in 1993 by Dr Don
Schultz, a noted academic in the field and a program lecturer:
Integrated Marketing Communication (IMC) is the process of developing and
implementing various forms of persuasive communication programs with
customers and prospects over time … the goal of IMC is to influence or directly
affect the behaviour of the selected communication audience. IMC considers all
sources of brand or company contacts which a company or prospect has with the
product or service as potential delivery channels for the future messages. IMC,
makes use of all forms of communication which are relevant to the customer and
prospects, and to which they might be receptive.
For TAFE NSW, the examples provided by the companies I interviewed will provide a
number of relevant and up-to-date case studies for use in the Introduction to Arts
Marketing and Introduction to Not-for-profit Marketing courses it runs as part of the
entire marketing suite of courses. The issue of strategic marketing communications needs
to be included as an integral part of the way TAFE NSW delivers its promotions mix
competency and the information from this research project will be provided to the
program manager for distribution to all marketing teachers across the state.
Applying some of the theoretical and United States industry examples, there appear to be
three main tools of strategic marketing communications that are relevant to the not-forprofit or arts community that are particularly relevant when issues such as resources and
expertise can be seen as limiting factors to any successful communications process:

branding as a communications tool;

community as a communications tool; and

loyalty as a communications tool.
Branding as communications tool
Branding is one the core tenets of the Kellogg approach to marketing communications.
According to Shell’s global brand manager for Shell Helix, their brand is their strongest
message. Interestingly, most of the methods of marketing communications discussed
required significant investments of capital (in terms of funding, infrastructure and
expertise). Pfizer Animal Care Products had their entire marketing team as well as their
agency partners at this program (eight people at US$5000 each) in order to develop a
better strategic understanding of their current communications program and their next
five-year plan.
Through the course of the study tour, I observed the pervasive nature of brands
throughout the United States. In New York, the last week of March marked the
beginning of baseball season. It had a particular resonance as the first games of the real
season were with the New York Yankees archenemy, the Boston Red Sox. For the first
week I was in New York I saw very little indication that baseball had any real market
impact in New York. Then one week out, one in three people in New York City were
wearing some form of Yankees branding. Everything from caps, to jerseys, to shirts, to
shorts to the cups they drank their super-sized McDonalds Coke out of, you could not
escape the Yankees. At Yankee Stadium, 65,000 screaming Yankees fans were a sea of
blue and white, right down to the newly painted stadium walls. This demonstrated the
real power of the brand in the United States. The Yankees did not need to litter Times
Square with billboards; they had millions of them walking down Broadway every day.
This kind of brand impact is not readily visible in Australia. However, it demonstrates
that in the United States, brand is king. It is the most pervasive form of marketing
communications. The issue is: how do smaller businesses, arts organisations and
individuals harness the power of this communications tool? Through the course of my
interviews, there seemed to be two limiting factors. Firstly, the sheer impact of the
number of Yankees fans, or people professing their loyalty to New York by wearing their
‘neigbourhoody’ (a hooded top indicating what neighbourhood or university they were
from, Queens, the Bronx, even right down to the block or street they came from), makes
it hard for a small theatre or band to even penetrate the perception of a large enough
audience. Secondly, the intense competition that exists for attention in most American
cities makes the communications process even harder (let alone issues of how can people
access these mediums to get their message across).
Some education institutions such as the University of California, Berkeley, and Harvard
University have addressed these limitations head on. The ‘front door’ of their institutions
appears to be their retail shops. In Harvard’s case, a four-storey behemoth dominates
most of Cambridge, the small college town that straddles Harvard and MIT. All the
visitors, tourists, students and academics are assaulted by a veritable department store of
the Harvard brand on everything from T-shirts, to tops, to pencils and pads through to
teddy bears. Parents wanting their eight-year-old sons to go to Harvard were fitting them
out with all the gear, imprinting on them the need to get to Harvard.
For other organisations, such as Dan Gillmor’s Grassroots media
(http://www.dangillmor.com), the brand name is not so much a reminder of where they
are from or what they have purchased and even less a walking billboard; it is a statement
of purpose or intent, a way to communicate what they are about and what they do.
Grassroots Media, based in San Francisco, is a ‘project to encourage and enable more
citizen-based media’. The aim of the project is to return the creation and dissemination
of the media back to the community. The ‘brand’ tells the story of what they do, and is
communicated through Gillmor’s web site and through his blog, which in turn is read by
the community he is hoping to harness.
The use of branding as communications is underexplored in the delivery of marketing
within TAFE NSW. The addition of the case studies from this research project, as well
as being able to discuss some of the issues at the annual marketing teachers to be held in
June, should bring the more contemporary ideas to the awareness of all marketing
teachers in NSW.
Community (audience) as a communications tool
The second major tenet of the Kellogg approach to strategic marketing communications
is a two-way dialogue with your audience or target market. Don Schultz, one of the
forefathers of strategic marketing communications and lecturer in the program,
advocates the simple and oft-ignored tactic of talking directly to your customer, finding
out you and they have in common and speaking to them in a way they can understand
and that successfully communicates your message.
For many of the arts and not-for-profit organisations I interviewed over the course of
this study, the concept of community is the tool that resonated most strongly. In some
cases this was due to the fact that they were doing it already. For example, Independent
Arts and Media (http://www.artsandmedia.net), a training and cultural collective in San
Francisco, have run a number of free expos over the last five years where both
collaboration and education can occur between marketers, volunteers and artists. One of
the founders, Josh Wilson, noted in an interview that Independent Arts and Media were
actually part of a huge community of like-minded organisations (around 100) that all
supported the needs of the artistic community in the Bay Area. When a model of
marketing communications was discussed, he was surprised to see that they were actually
doing most of it, without a formal marketing plan. In another case, the building of
community served the duel purpose of marketing and engagement with their audience.
For example, the ArtCenter, South Florida, located in the heart of Miami Beach, offers
artists spaces in which to work in return for direct engagement through public access to
the workshops and exhibition space.
There were many other examples of this community–marketing interaction. Part of this
study was to develop case studies of arts and not-for-profit organisations for use in
classrooms across TAFE NSW to help improve the understanding of the unique issues
facing arts and not-for-profit marketers. The following are extracts from those case
studies that will help to illustrate the diverse ways that United States organisations use
community as a strategic marketing communications tool.
ArtCenter (South Florida)
http://www.artcentersf.org/
ArtCenter provide a real nexus between the community who walk by one of Miami
Beach’s most popular malls (Lincoln Road Mall) and the arts community of a very
disconnected city. ArtCenter offer low rent artist workshops and retail space to nearly 50
artists on a triennial curated cycle. Over 50,000 people per year come into their two art
deco buildings to watch artists at work and interact with them. The community
communication tool at work is dialogue and engagement. Community members and the
artist can discuss, argue, agree or inspire each other, while achieving the retail outcome of
artwork sales.
ArtCenter, Lincoln Road, Miami Beach, South Florida
Kranky Records
http://www.kranky.com
Kranky Records is a Chicago independent record label which releases a diverse range of
rock and post-rock recordings from bands like Low and Australia’s Dirty Three. Bruce
Adams, one of the co-founders, discussed the difference between the community of
talkers and the community of buyers. A lot of recordings Kranky releases become
‘turntable hits’ where college radio hit-lists the album and independent music web sites
such as Pitchfork (http://www.pitchforkmedia.com) talk it up, but no one actually buys
the record.
Kranky staff have begun to see their community more in terms of purchase and repurchase behaviour. They have responded to this by developing their own online sales
engine, regular
e-newsletters and a forum for fans (not reviewers) of Kranky bands, and controlling all
of this through their web site.
WFMU
http://www.wfmu.org
WFMU is an independent free-form community radio station broadcasting on 91.1 FM
in the New York City area, and 90.1 FM in the Hudson Valley (New Jersey). WFMU is
one of America’s best known public radio stations, with a large penetration into the
massive New York City radio market and with a web audience around the world. As a
community radio station, they rely on their community to provide both supply and
demand. On the supply side, the community generates volunteers, donations,
programmers, bands, and content. On the demand side, the community are the listeners
who consume the product. Ken Freedman, long-time station manager, believes in the
concept of ‘do something and they will come’. There is a huge available audience in New
York and New Jersey, and around the world through their web and pod casts. The staff
and volunteers believe that WFMU does not need to change to suit its audience; the
audience will change when the station suits them. They believe they are offering a great
product, and there is a community who wants that product and a community who
doesn’t. They target the ones that do. Despite the uni-directional perspective regarding
audience, most programs have frequent audience interaction, competitions and the like,
but there is no financial commitment on behalf of the audience in order to listen (as
there is in Australia through subscriptions or memberships).
Urban Gateways: Center for Arts Education
http://www.urbangateways.org
Urban Gateways: Center for Arts Education is a not-for-profit organisation that provides
‘multicultural performing, visual, and literary arts programs for children, teachers, and
parents in the Chicago metropolitan area’. A semi-government funded group, they focus
their efforts on areas of Chicago that can’t afford, or have no interest in, offering arts
education to primarily junior high school students. Program Director Tim Sauers looks at
the idea of education as a primary responsibility of community, as many of the school
districts they enter have no way of demonstrating artistic expression or maintaining their
culture through arts. Their strongest use of community as communication is to use wordof-mouth to spread the message about art and demonstrate to parents and elders that art
is valid outcome of education in their hope to bring more kids in from the arts
wilderness and into formal arts education. They educate tens of thousands of students
each year, with a total of over 300,000 in their 43-year history.
Fairwest
http://www.fairwest.com
Fairwest are a radio marketing company based in San Diego, California. Fairwest have
developed a number of radio loyalty systems that utilise the power of community for the
competitive radio market. The aim of their system is to build a tangible community of
listeners around a radio station through the development of an online listening club,
whereby the community can interact with the announcers and the station and be
rewarded with a range of ‘priceless’ rewards such as having American Idol’s Ryan
Seacrest record your mobile voicemail message for you! KIIS FM in Los Angeles has
over 10,000 people in their club. The loyalty system is driven by an accrual of points that
encourages the members to listen for keywords, visit sponsors to get another set of key
phrases or even partake in online surveys to increase their number of points. Each set of
target points reached has a reward for the club member. The system also allows them to
feed back to the station what they like and don’t like, creating a unique dialogue for a
commercial operation.
Andy Shaw Promotions
http://www.shawpromotion.com
Andy Shaw is one of the new breed of nightclub promoters in the United States. He is
young and ready to challenge the traditional ways music and entertainment have been
marketed. New York City is a night town, deserted streets in rundown parts of the city
come alive at 11 p.m. with well-dressed New Yorkers looking for the newest place to
drink and the newest band with the sound that will be rocking the rest of the world next
week. Andy Shaw promotes his clubs (around six to eight per week) using a number of
community-based marketing methods. He forgoes high impact street press such as the
Village Voice and uses hand-to-hand flyering, word-of-mouth, a very active email list and
a social photography web page to make people feel they are part of something elite or
special.
Andy wants to know the people who come to his clubs. He has developed a model in
which both the community aspect of his operation (many of his clubs are free, the DJ’s
do it for love and he puts things on that he likes or that community wants) and the
corporate aspect (through contra deals with alcohol companies, dancers and clothing
stores) can come together and develop informal relationships that are mutually beneficial.
It is really a neighbourhood community, which is very indicative of New York City.
There is a real sense of identification and ownership by the community of these clubs,
and an even stronger sense of loyalty.
Brooklyn Museum
http://www.brooklynmuseum.org/about/
The Brooklyn Museum in New York City has had to develop a strategy of local
community engagement simply by virtue of its proximity to at least two of the world’s
greatest galleries (the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Modern Art). It
has set itself the objective of repeat purchase behaviour from its local community rather
than the constant one-off stream of tourists who visit the Met or MOMA. Apart from
innovative arts programming, accessible community access (through open storage
facilities, community information and research) and a constantly rotating permanent
collection, the museum has developed a program called Target First Saturdays
(sponsored by retailer Target).
Main foyer of the Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn, New York.
First Saturday is a community festival where the gallery stays open until 11 p.m., talks
and lectures are given, and education programs for both young and old are programmed
for free. The venue plays host to film festivals and events, and the evening is rounded
out with a dance party highlighting music from the world. People queue for hours to
ensure that they get into the gallery and the program of events. First Saturday is a
constant crowd puller from around the Brooklyn area, making the gallery the centrepiece
of the neighbourhood. It has played a vital role in the urban redevelopment of the
Brooklyn area.
Loyalty as communications tool
Dr Andrew Razeghi of the Kellogg School discussed the issue of loyalty as an integral
part of contemporary marketing communications. The traditional view of loyalty puts it
squarely at the feet of the customer. Dr Razeghi suggests a different approach. He
challenges companies to see loyalty from their side, from the position of offering loyalty
to the customer, summarised as ‘love the one you’re with’. He believes that companies
need to see the consumers as more than statistics, numbers or users, and to give them as
much loyalty as they expect from the consumer. This two-way loyalty stream can be
closely related to the two-way communication outcomes that result from a successful
community building exercise.
Southwest Airlines is an extremely profitable example of how this works. Southwest is
one of the few US airlines that have not gone into bankruptcy protection in the wake of
9/11. The Southwest experience, as they call it, has engendered an enormous amount of
loyalty from their staff (who earn less than most airlines staff, work longer shifts and deal
with a much more varied customer base) and their customers (who fly Southwest no
matter what). Customer loyalty is one thing. They have no flight lounges, frequent flyer
clubs or any of the traditional airline loyalty programs. Pricing is a factor of loyalty (when
you can fly from Chicago to San Diego for US$39 as an everyday fare, not many people
are complaining); however, there is more to the Southwest success than simply good
pricing.
I flew Southwest from Oakland in San Francisco to San Diego to conduct an interview.
From check in, to gate, to flight, through checkout and even US airport security I felt
part of something. I will never be a regular Southwest customer (as they don’t operate in
Australia), yet I felt like I was a member of the Southwest club. Through staff training,
consumer-responsive policies and procedures, accurate marketing communications
(you’d never think you were going to get Singapore Airlines-level service on Southwest
by watching any of the advertising or their related materials) and simple Southern charm,
they were able to demonstrate an intangible loyalty to their patrons. This, is turn,
according to Dr Razeghi’s theory, results in a much stronger loyalty from the customers.
According to Joyce Rogge, Southwest's Senior Vice President of Marketing, the airline
prides itself on being a customer service company that cares about the communities it
serves, and all the corporate activities they do revolve around that objective.
Another example came from an interview I conducted with Derek Sivers, the founder of
CD Baby (http://www.cdbaby.com). CD Baby is a web site that distributes solely
independent music (often from people who make and produce their music at home) and
has developed an intuitive search engine that allows people to find like artists from a
database of over 100,000 different releases. When asked about the process of building
loyalty, he discussed both the issue of building loyalty among the artists (over 80,000 and
counting) and the people who buy the CDs. ‘Once someone has bought a CD here once,
it's my mission to turn them on to more music they'll like. It's also just smart business.
There are billions of people on earth who are NOT the target market for the not-yetfamous artists on CD Baby. So the few that actually come in our door get our full
attention, since we know they're our type of people.’
Conclusions
There are significant changes occurring in the area of strategic marketing
communications in the United States. These offer many organisations, both corporate
and cultural, the opportunity to develop better and more sustainable ways to engage the
customer and develop longer, more loyal relationships. These changes, case studies
evidencing successful and not so successful applications of these new approaches, will be
provided for all marketing teachers within TAFE NSW.
The marketing communications challenges faced by arts and not-for-profit organisations
are significant but are solvable through a combination of more appropriate strategies
(branding, loyalty and community) and through the implementation and development of
programs to improve business literacy and communication skills. The case studies being
written as part of the outcomes of this study will demonstrate these challenges and allow
students to engage with the problems, be exposed to the solutions and discuss within
their class how the underpinning knowledge may be applied to Australian companies.
From the experience of organisations such as Southwest, size, budget and scope are not
the determinants of successful marketing communications. The development of a unified
organisational approach (from backroom to customer service) helps deliver customer
loyalty and build a sense of community around an organisation.
Endnote
For copies of the case studies developed from this research tour and any other
information, please do not hesitate to contact me at [email protected].