Brand and audience research
Aberystwyth Arts Centre has a hugely busy and varied programme of activities and not enough hours in the day to give each the marketing attention it deserves – they needed a change, a different approach that would make their marketing resource more efficient?
We identified the opportunity to focus more resource on building the Arts Centre brand – building an engaged audience eager to see what’s coming next – rather than tweaking event by event marketing in the hope of marginal gains.
A big workshop with all staff invited explored some hypotheses as to the most likely reasons people form attachments to the Arts Centre. How do people engage, what gets fed back to them, what motivates audience involvement, what do their best days look like?
We then convened an Audience Day with 30 audience members representing different kinds of relationships with the Centre. Through open questions, tasks and focus groups we had both top of mind responses and in-depth, nuanced conversations – digging below the surface into what they thought and felt about the Arts Centre and why.
Audiences had huge amounts of affection for the Arts Centre were able to give clear and consistent reasons why they loved to come and the role it played in their lives. This enabled us to build a brand strategy and key messages toolkit – giving them clear direction and focus for marketing resource. We ran training with the marketing team to put this into practice and should see it rolling out soon. The strategy, in a nutshell is to lead with the Arts Centre brand experience story – always offering clear and simple information of choices for your next visit.
This is designed to: remind existing fans why they love the Arts Centre; make lapsed fans miss that feeling they love; and invite new fans who are unaware of the brilliant experience on offer – since they would love it too if they knew what the Arts Centre was like to visit.
The Arts Centre is now recruiting to build a new brand marketing team and we’re excited to see this gear shift from event sales to brand marketing.
