What the Arts Can Learn from a Surfshop (or, are we marketing to the right people?)

A woman owns a store called Bonfire Beach. It specializes in the latest styles in surf fashion and has a loyal customer base, consisting of 75% male and 25% female clients, mostly aged 16 to 21, who live within a six mile radius.

One day the store owner decides to expand her business. She does some research and learns the demographic group in her area that spends the most on clothing is professional women, ages 25 through 40.

She spends a lot of dough on fancy marketing materials and plans a splashy event, welcoming this demographic group to her store. The turnout isn’t as large as she hoped, but she’s determined to sell, sell, sell!

The 25 to 40-year-old women take a free mat tai and poke through the clothing for a while. Most don’t end up buying anything, and the store owner overhears a few customers comment that there isn’t anything they’d wear. A few women buy swimsuits, and one woman buys a pair of shorts for her 16-year-old son.

A few weeks pass. There are no new 25 to 40-year-old female customers. The women who bought swimsuits don’t return – they are busy professionals, so they only need one swimsuit. The woman who bought the shorts for her son comes back to return them. (Apparently, Bonfire Beach isn’t a trendy store for 16 year old boys anymore, now that all their marketing is aimed at 25 to 40-year-old women.)

The plan totally failed because, well, this is a transparently ridiculous story. No intelligent store owner would ever do any of this.

So why do we do it all the time in theatre? We know our core audience but we convince ourselves that the way to grow our audience is to reach new kinds of buyers. We neglect the fact that we haven’t tapped out our target buyer group yet. Theatre professionals spend a lot of time fretting that “only well-to-do individuals in their 60s and up buy tickets these days,” and our solution is to spend time and money marketing to “new audiences” so someone is there to replace these aging audiences. Never mind that theatre audiences have swayed older for decades and manage to replace themselves year after year with a new supply of older adults who are excited to finally have time to go to a show. Never mind that common sense tells us a retired 65-year-old couple, with no kids left to support and plenty of spare time, will clearly have a logistically easier time getting to a $65 per ticket show on a Tuesday night than a 35-year-old working couple with two young kids and a mortgage. We ignore the profile of our most likely buyer in favor of marketing to, you know, “the public, in general.”

What’s worse is that we sometimes even change our programming to appeal to a new crowd. We make artistic choices based not on the merit of a piece of theatre, but on a poorly designed marketing scheme that doesn’t even have a chance of attracting new audiences. We worry that unless we get new audiences, theatre will see its demise. And we respond to that worry by ensuring its demise by not even producing the shows that mean something to us, in favor of work chosen just because it might appeal to a group who doesn’t even seem interested in coming.

My wish for not-for-profit theatre is that it would concentrate on marketing to its built-in audience. If sales are not going well, focus on a clearly identified target buyer, just like for-profit companies in all industries do. There is no way theatre has tapped out that target market, at least not in Los Angeles. We should embrace those buyers, not make them feel like we'd rather have someone younger, hipper, and newer to theatre in that seat.

And certainly theatre companies should try to reach new audiences. We should be creative and find ways to attract and engage younger and more diverse crowds. We should figure out what within our art form speaks to us so deeply that we want to share it and preserve it and keep it thriving. And then we should bottle up that passion and figure out a way to spread it around to all sorts of new types of audience members. But we should call that outreach, not marketing.