Classifications of audience development

In her Guide to Audience Development Maitland divides audience development by the people who are doing it: education workers, artists and marketers. These three groups approach the subject from different angles. Educators apply audience development through participatory projects that usually aim for participants individual development. Artists can take part in audience development by opening up their points of view or processes, thus maybe improving the understanding and appreciation of the art they’re performing. The results from these kind of projects are hard to measure. (Maitland 2000, 5.)

The marketers on the other hand are mainly looking for tangible results, such as increase in sales, and creating carefully aimed and planned projects that should reflect in the attendance numbers of their events and the revenue of the organisation (Maitland 2000, 5). Maitland does not involve value co-creation in the marketer’s goals.

While this classification includes marketing as an obvious part of audience development, it also keeps it strictly separated from the actual art. As value is created in cooperation between

the artist and the audience, this is a problematic starting point. This kind of approach of dividing artistic and marketing functions has later on sparked some criticism, as fruitful cooperation between these departments that are eventually aiming for the same goals would be more efficient (Hayes & Slater 2002, 11). As audience development has lately become more established and organised in different institutions’ administrations, recent audience development projects also show much more cooperation across educators, artists and marketers.

Hayes and Slater (2002) point out the obvious difference between the two most distinguished target groups of audience development: those who have already attended institution’s events and those not ever or currently attending. They classify audience development projects accordingly to two separate entities: missionary (aimed at potential audiences) and mainstream (aimed at existing audience). They point out that missionary audience development is not only expensive, but also difficult and hardly ever successful. It is much cheaper and easier to retain existing audiences and nurture the loyal members of the audience.

They come up to the conclusion that institution’s audience development program should be balanced between these two, and this could be achieved by applying more management involvement and clearer strategies. (Hayes & Slater 2002, 4, 11.) It should always be addressed in the early stages of planning a marketing project or campaign to which part of the audience members the project is aimed at: the existing or potential ones (Kotler & Sheff 1997, 93, 436–438). While it’s important that a marketing campaign is planned as either missionary or mainstream, the same campaign can also simultaneously achieve results in both target categories.

While Hayes and Slater only take into consideration the target group of an audience development project in their classification, Kawashima (2000) on the other hand distinguishes three variables: target group, the form the project takes and the purpose it has. Different combinations of these variables form four different types of audience development: cultural inclusion, extended marketing, taste cultivation and audience education. (Kawashima 2000, 8.)

The first two are aimed at potential audiences, so missionary. The form the project then separates the missionary type audience development projects to cultural inclusion type, which are outreach projects aimed towards under-represented social groups typically in their own environment; and extended marketing, which aims to enhance the existing product to being more approachable for potential audiences. The purpose of cultural inclusion projects is social, and the purpose of extended marketing mainly financial, but also artistic. (Kawashima 2000, 8–9.)

The latter two types are mainstream, aimed at existing audience. Taste cultivation takes the form of educational opportunities for the existing audience to extend and broaden their knowledge on different, unfamiliar, new genres such as contemporary music, and audience education forms around offering deeper knowledge on the already familiar art forms to enhance and deepen the existing audience member’s artistic experience on their already comfort zone. The purpose of taste cultivation is artistic and in audience education educational. Both do also have a secondary financial purpose. (Kawashima 2000, 8–9.)

To conclude, a look at these different ways to categorise audience development from mobile marketing point of view is taken. It needs to be kept in mind that mobile marketing can take many different forms and shapes. A mobile marketing project or campaign as an audience development project would most likely mainly be executed by marketers. For the project to be more wholesome, cooperative audience development as Hayes and Slater (2002) are recommending, the planning should also involve artists and educators as content creators. As it has been established that missionary audience development is very hard to make successful, also mobile marketing would most likely appeal mainly for the already existing audience, making it mainstream. However, it could have also missionary ripple effects. An innovative form of mobile marketing might spark interest in some new audiences or at least make the orchestra more approachable to new audience segments. Depending on the purpose, mobile marketing could also be designed as missionary from the beginning. In Kawashima’s (2000) four meanings mobile marketing would most likely fall in extended marketing making it in fact missionary. Depending on it’s contents mobile marketing could also simultaneously lean heavily to taste cultivation and audience education.