Hitting the target

We’re born with an ability to communicate effectively. We tailor what we say and how we say it to fit our understanding of the person we are talking to. We monitor that understanding by looking for visual and verbal clues that show our message is being received and understood. Wouldn’t it be great if we could communicate face-to-face with each one of our potential visitors, audience members or participants? We could be so persuasive. Of course, that’s rarely possible, so we have a problem. A message from us can successfully persuade one person but turn someone else off. The solution is to group together people who have something in common so they are likely to respond in a similar way. These groups are known in the arts as target markets or target audiences. Effective marketing involves focusing on the target markets that will best help an organisation to achieve its artistic, financial and social objectives.

The easiest way to divide people into target markets – to segment them – is to use the characteristics that are easiest to spot. We tend to use descriptive factors such as age or occupation. But although lots of contemporary dance attenders are teachers aged 35 to 54, not all teachers in that age group attend contemporary dance. What makes people tick – that is, what shapes their behaviour – are their attitudes and beliefs. Until now, the segmentation tools available to arts organisations have been based on socio-demographic descriptions. The idea that similar kinds of people live in similar areas is at the heart of the geo-demographic profiling tools ACORN and Mosaic. They both combine information from the 2001 Census with lifestyle and financial information to give each postcode in the UK a classification that describes the kind of people who live there. 

Taking part

The Target Group Index is a general survey that asks an annual sample of 25,000 people across the UK about what they buy and how they live. Since 1986, it has included questions about which artforms people attend and how often they attend them. These tools have changed the way we market the arts, allowing us to target far more effectively, but they are limited. We can only use them by fitting our existing and potential audiences, visitors, and participants into segments based on socio-demographic description. All that is about to change. Arts Council England (ACE) has created a way of segmenting the population using arts-related attitudes, beliefs and behaviours, not just descriptions. Each year for the past three years, the ‘Taking Part’ survey has interviewed around 24,000 adults aged 16 and over about their engagement (and non-engagement) with culture, heritage, leisure and sport. The survey explores the attitudes and beliefs that lie behind that engagement and the reasons for non-engagement. This research is valuable in itself, but ACE has taken it further.

ACE has used the data about the interviewees’ arts attendance, participation, attitudes and beliefs to divide English adults into 13 segments. They have then used ACORN to create a profile of the attitudes, purchasing behaviour and demographics of each segment. The results are called ‘Arts Audience Insight’. For the first time, we have a segmentation tool that starts with the art, embraces the whole of the adult population – including people with little or no experience of the arts – and looks at the whole range of their engagement including participation as well as attendance, and their informal engagement at home as well as in arts venues.

Middle of the road

In many ways, this arts-based segmentation confirms what we know already. There are groups in our society for whom the arts are irrelevant, and there are others for whom the arts are central to their lifestyle. We already target most of our marketing at the former and most of our audience development work at the latter. But I was surprised how small these groups are: the enthusiastic arts attenders represent just 9% of the adult population and the unengaged represent 23%. That leaves over two thirds of the population somewhere in the middle, very occasionally attending and participating in a limited range of arts activities. These segments are core territory for many commercial arts and entertainment organisations, but does the subsidised arts sector invest enough in persuading them to try different arts experiences and attend more often? That’s where Audience Insight can help most. The profile of the attitudes, purchasing behaviour and demographics of each segment gives us a vivid understanding of the likes and dislikes of the people in it, the way they spend their leisure time and what might persuade them to engage more with the arts.

Beyond marketing

The importance of this insight goes beyond making our marketing more effective. In his report for the DCMS, Brian McMaster defines excellence in culture as occurring “when an experience affects and changes an individual”. In this definition, excellence can only truly be achieved through a process of engagement with the audience: “for something to be excellent it has to be relevant, and for it to be relevant it has to be continually reinterpreted and refined for and by its audience”. ¹ According to McMaster, relevance can only be achieved when we understand how audiences experience the work. Audience Insight is a useful starting point in achieving that understanding. But can it help us turn this understanding into action? The good news is that there’s been some joined-up thinking going on. Catherine Bunting, Director of Research Strategy at ACE, tells me that by the new year, the Audience Insight website will be developed to include an interactive spreadsheet giving the detailed attendance, participation, motivation and demographic data from the ‘Taking Part’ survey for each of the segments. There will also be a table showing the prevalence of each segment in the population of each of the English regions. Her department is planning a feasibility study into the inclusion of the Audience Insight segments in Area Profile Reports, the detailed profiles of local areas available to organisations funded by one of the UK arts councils. This would tell us where we are most likely to find each of the segments in our own catchment area at postal sector level. The feasibility study will also explore the development of an index to enable us to profile our own ticket buyers.