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Last week, I wrote a piece about the traps we fall into as arts, culture and heritage organisations when it comes to engaging audiences. Questions were raised about relevance, audience frameworks and planning. This week I suggest how we might do things differently and offer some solutions to those pitfalls.
Positioning audiences differently
At this year’s Arts Marketing Association conference, the National Arts Strategies president, Russell Willis Taylor, made some thought-provoking points through a case study on Ikea from which she believed arts and culture can learn. One of these was about knowing your value proposition: what are you uniquely placed to offer and how can this exude through an organisation?
Willis Taylor encouraged us to be opportunistic, to build in space, energy and money in order to learn, keep our eyes open and be flexible and responsive. Her example to illustrate this in Ikea was the employee who started screwing off table legs to get the furniture into customers’ cars, which led to a revolution in the brand’s production and the flatpack we all know and (mostly) love today.
However, it was the points she made about how we think about audiences and customers that resonate most. Russell believes that we need to position audiences within our organisations as partners and consider very carefully the nature of our relationship with them. This, she said, should be clearly set out in a mission statement.
But more than this, we need to build this mindset into our activity and observe and listen – to users and non-users. This requires us as organisations to step out of our own worlds, forget (for a moment) about getting paying visitors through our doors and instead consider the communities they belong to and what the relationship between our value proposition and these communities is.
Knowing our audiences is a matter of leadership. It’s also the responsibility of everyone in an organisation; it should be part of the culture. Frameworks and segmentation are all necessary and useful tools, but I wonder if they undermine the art of active listening and somehow create a barrier to really knowing your audiences and working with them.
Adapting to changing behaviours and the blurring of lines
Speaking at the same conference as Willis Taylor, Ben Cameron of the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation said that gone are the days when we can think of our audiences as consumers and people with whom we transact. Behaviours have changed and are changing, he said. Increasingly, the way we find our way in the world is through participation (in its many and various forms): through social media, crowd sourcing and funding, and co-curation. He likened the current situation to that of the religious reformation where, fuelled by the printing press, people’s belief that they did not necessarily need a priest to feel closer to God, grew. It raised a question about the role of cultural organisations today: are we still the conduits to divine cultural inspiration?
I got the impression that Cameron does feel there is a role for cultural organisations, but that we have to think differently about the activity the role entails. He spoke of creating experiences, not products; platforms, not venues; communities, not audiences. This sums up the potential role of culture that is in tune with the modern world: allowing people to explore culture on their own terms, in a way that responds to their changing tastes and behaviours and that does not fixate on buildings, products and brands.
In a recent presentation to other Clore Fellows 2013/14, cultural commentator John Holden outlined the three categories of culture as high arts (publicly funded), popular culture (commercial) and homemade (or amateur) culture, the latter of which has risen so quickly in a world where an individual’s ability to create is much easier and cheaper than before.
The lines between these categories are increasingly blurry and an indication of how tastes and behaviours are demanding new models of engagement in culture, where distinction is less clear between professional and amateur, producers and consumers, serious and playful.
We only need to look at successes such as Banksy v Bristol Museum: a tantalising interplay between a traditional museum setting and an elusive, mischievous and challenging graffiti artist who set about “remixing” the museum’s collection with some of his own works. It had people queuing for hours.
Conclusions
Blurring the lines involves risk and pulling it off with style involves creative flair and leadership. But by positioning audiences as partners and communities in our organisations, and living and breathing our relationship with them, this will also lead to greater permission to take risk. Cameron and Willis Taylor remind us that society is changing and that this brings into question the activity of arts, cultural and heritage organisations. This does not mean that we have to debase our value proposition (so long as it is the right one). It does not mean that we have to go all-out commercial either.
What it does mean is that we have to start thinking about how and why our communities will want to see us as part of their daily lives. As Willis Taylor said: people need to be taken out of themselves and entertainment is important. This does not necessarily have to translate as light, trivial or fictitious.
As a sector, we need to have confidence in the role we have to play in people’s lives. We can provoke life-changing experiences and provide trivial fancies that surprise and delight – possibly at the same time. Perhaps if we felt closer to our audiences we may feel less insecure in our role and more willing to not just protect what we have but bring it to life in ways that capture the imaginations ofgenerations to come.
James McQuaid is a visitor experience consultant and Clore fellow
Read the first part of this series: the audience traps we fall into
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