A Script to Bring Spectators to Theaters

Theater marketing is a difficult yet necessary activity. In Italy, we are experiencing a significant drop in subscriptions to theater seasons, and implementing targeted marketing moves to develop the audience is therefore an increasingly felt need. And the situation does not change if you move to richer countries: according to a survey conducted by the National Endowment for the Arts, in the United States theater attendance has been steadily decreasing since 2008, and the main cause, according to this analysis conducted in 2016, is represented by the growth of digital media.

To cope with these difficulties, theaters have launched marketing campaigns that are based primarily on understanding the needs of their customers. Drama and opera institutions should not make a leap in the dark without a detailed understanding of consumer behavior, trends and patterns. Typically, a centralized ticket booking system (e.g. Ticketone or Vivaticket) can provide detailed real-time information on ticket sales and buyer details, while CRM software is now capable of helping locate opportunities and risks, thus making marketing strategies more effective.

Directors and superintendents aim at qualitatively and quantitatively increasing spectatorship for their theaters. It's not just about selling more tickets or increasing box office revenues (by either increasing prices or the number of shows). By audience development, we mean something wider and deeper. The term refers to the strategic and dynamic process of enlargement and diversification of the public and improvement of the overall conditions of cultural fruition.

So it's not just about involving the people who already go to theater, but about reaching out to those who do not. Major theaters and cultural institutions (including museums) have adopted a number of audience development programs in recent years, so as not to leave marketing initiatives to the sporadic enthusiasm of theater directors, but insert them into a detailed and comprehensive audience development plan, which contemplates as its targets both the quantitative increase and qualitative increase of the public. In fact, each theater can act on the spectator side, either by focusing on the existing and potential public or on its present and future cultural offer. By doing this, it is possible to create a matrix that lists the actions to be executed for the development of the audience and the relationships that theaters have with their spectators.

There are numerous examples of good practice in audience development, and almost all theaters are now aware of its importance. There are emblematic cases of how attention to the public (audience centricity) has become a distinctive feature of the marketing strategy of major theaters. For example, a major US cultural institutions like the Lincoln Center for Performing Arts in New York, which almost every evening fills spectator seats in its spaces devoted to the performing arts (concert halls, opera and drama), has activated an even more ambitious program for the development and education of the public (community outreach), which takes the theater from Manhattan to the poor neighborhoods of the city, by featuring plays and concerts there and interacting with the public who is unable to go downtown. Threading on the footsteps of the Lincoln Center Local Program, several other cultural institutions have organized free screenings in places far from downtown theaters, such as La Scala opera premiere which could be watched in Milan cinemas and was projected on the big screen inside San Vittore, the city prison.