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When going fishing, take the right bait: How to be true to yourself and still make a living in the performing arts

Deon Opperman* uses the m-word

Introduction
Before presenting the thesis of this essay, a point of clarification. The term marketing is defined throughout, not as "publicity and promotions", which activities refer to the raising of awareness of, and desire for, existing products, but rather as the process of new product development to satisfy statistically verified, but as yet unfulfilled, consumer needs and wants.

Marketing is therefore understood to be the process governing the development of new products for established wants and needs.

Also: in my pursuit of a profitable career in the performing arts I have often been accused of "betraying the cause" of art. I am of the firm opinion that any industry that does not strive for profitability cannot be a sustainable one, other than relying on subsidisation and charity. If the performing arts are to be respected as a meaningful and vital part of the social, economic and political fabric of a society, then they can be so only if they can demonstrate their ability to contend with the market forces that act upon all other industries. Artists are not "owed" a living any more than doctors or bankers are owed a living.

The strength and leverage of the national arts festivals, and also the smaller arts festivals, are attributable to the economic impact they have on the cities or towns in which they are held. Indeed, it is this very economic impact that gives the festivals the political and social clout that they have. Consider, for a moment, the economic deprivation of Oudtshoorn were the KKNK to relocate to another town. The financial impact of the festivals on their respective towns is well-publicised and can be accessed if required. And the performing artists are there because, whether they like to admit it or not, they have reason to believe that the audiences are there, promising good ticket sales, and by implication, financial survival.

The central thesis of this essay is therefore this: if the performing arts wish to thrive and grow, then they have no choice but to embrace the marketing skills, techniques and research methodologies being utilised by all other industries in their pursuit of competitive advantage, profit, growth and sustainability.

This does not mean that the artist is left with no choice but to compromise his/her integrity or message. On the contrary, it means that the artist is obliged to find out (a) whether what he or she wants to say is relevant to anyone else, and (b) how to say it so that the target market will hear and imbibe it and be transformed by it.

There is a school of thought among South African artists that the performance platform is there first and foremost for the artist to satisfy his or her own wants and needs. This essay is diametrically opposed that school of thought, and is directed towards those performing artists who subscribe to the notion that making art is an attempt to communicate with an audience, and that that being so, the successful artist will be one who identifies the most efficacious means of communication for the time; who, to paraphrase Shakespeare, successfully holds a mirror up to nature and shows the very age and body of the time its form and pressure.

The audience is the thing
Day (1994) asserted that superior business performance is the result of superior skills in understanding and satisfying customers. To understand and satisfy customers there must be "the organization-wide generation of market intelligence, dissemination of its intelligence across departments, and organization-wide responsiveness to it" (Kohli & Jaworski 1990:6).

A management that is not focused on satisfying the needs of its target consumers is at odds with the basic tenet of marketing, which is to satisfy customer needs (Kohli & Jaworski 1990; Day 1994; Gale 1994; Cobb, Samuels & Sexton 1998; Day 1998; Gounaris & Avlonitis 2001). The current lack of, and even contempt for, efforts to determine audiences' entertainment wants and needs in contemporary South African theatre can be understood in the light of Rentschler's (2002) survey of published articles concerning marketing and the performing arts.

Rentschler pointed out that 171 arts marketing articles were published across the dominant seven accredited performing arts management journals over the last quarter century - hardly a substantial canon - of which the first 128 articles were concerned with marketing the arts as culture, and attempts at understanding the marketing mix, with little or no concern for the consumers' needs. The last 43 articles, published since 1995, presented various applications of marketing strategy to the performing arts, with a growing thematic emphasis on collaborative marketing, recognition of new economic realities, and a contemporary view of audiences (Kotler & Scheff 1997). The latter themes implied that, after 1995, performing arts management bodies and researchers were beginning to shift their focus towards market-oriented strategies.

Has this been the case in South Africa?

It is worth noting that not one of all the articles referenced by Rentschler (2002) was produced by a South African researcher.

Follow your heart
There appears to be an inbred aversion in performing artists even to considering a prescriptive, rational and analytical approach to the process that governs their selection of what to produce next. Rather, the bias seems to be towards intuitive, "gut-feel" decision-making.

Carneiro (2001) argued that a rational selection of interrelated data is a prerequisite for effective decision-making, but Bazerman (1986) rejected the assumption that decision-makers are consistently rational, or that they follow systematic steps, and observed that many successful decision-makers succeed precisely due to their intuitive strategies and resist any suggestions that their judgement may be deficient.

Emerging from the literature was a tension between advocates of Prescriptive Decision Making (PDM) (Saaty 1996; Vlek 1999; Carneiro 2001; Huber 2001; Schul 2003), who supported an organised, multi-attribute decision-making process founded on hierarchical decomposition, and expounders of Naturalistic Decision Making (NDM) (Clemen 2001; Bordley 2002), founded on a more intuitive, unstructured approach to decision-making.

Advocates of PDM argued that prescriptive methodologies often succeed in co-ordinating group members and focusing their attention on an agreed and common goal (Carneiro 2001) with a systematic evaluation of alternatives in terms of predetermined goals and objectives (Saaty 1996). Evidence derived from experiments was presented (Huber 2001; Schul 2003) to show that decision-makers who were forced to plan and justify their actions were more likely to make decisions that optimised resources. It was also claimed that the process yielded a greater consensus among group members. Gounaris & Avlonitis (2001) made the point that a company that relies exclusively on intuition puts itself at a competitive disadvantage.

Advocates of NDM, on the other hand, had as their point of departure the difficult-to-deny central assertion that the quality of a decision-making process is not determined by its logical consistency but by the quality of decisions that tend to emerge from the decision-making process (Bordley 2001). NDM, it was asserted (Clemen 2001), takes a descriptive, rather than prescriptive, stance towards decision-making, with an emphasis on observing the choice behaviour of experts in their domains (Clemen 2001).

Having identified the strategies to which prescriptive-averse decision-makers tend to resort, Janis (1989) issued the caveat that while unstructured and intuitive decision-making may be adequate for everyday, routine decisions, such methods would result in an ill-conceived decision outcome in more complex, multiple-criteria-decision environments, which the environments offered by festivals and other performance platforms are. There are simply too many variables involved to rely on a guess.

Intuition - important but dangerous
Kitts (2003) professed that human decisions are often predicated upon inferences about other humans' preferences, opinions and intentions. These misperceptions in social inferences affect decision-making. They were identified as: the "false consensus effect" in which individuals or groups believe that their own attitudes, beliefs and worldview are positively correlated with those of a target population (Fields & Schuman 1976; Ross, Greene & House 1997); the "false uniqueness effect" in which individuals or groups believe that their own attitudes, beliefs and worldview are negatively correlated with those of a target population (Goethals 1987; Frable 1993); and the "pluralistic effect" in which members of a particular population overestimate the support of the population of which they are members, for a prevailing norm (O'Gorman, Hubert & Garry 1976; Miller & McFarland 1987). Artists are particularly susceptible to the "pluralistic effect".

Building on the work of the above researchers, Kitts (2003) identified two primary forms of bias that affect decision-making: Intrinsic Bias and Information Bias.

Intrinsic Bias was subcategorised as follows:

a) Motivational

"self-esteem and self-justification", in which individuals regard their own negative traits as relatively common (false consensus as self-protective device) and their positive traits as relatively rare (false uniqueness as self-enhancement device)

b) Cognitive

"attribution", in which individuals see their own responses as the reasonable response to a situation

"ambiguity", the false assumption by an individual that other individuals interpret signs in the same way that he or she does

"availability", when an individual economises on processing by using himself or herself as a substitute for a systematic measurement of the population.

Information Bias was subcategorised as follows:

a) Target group conflation: when different target populations are pooled without controlling for differences in the true means of those populations

b) Selective exposure: when a relatively uniform population assumes that the larger social world shares its mean

c) Selective disclosure: when individuals withhold information about their counter-normative behaviours for fear of censure.

Clearly the way of intuitive decision-making, coloured as it is by individual human psychology, is fraught with danger, a hit-and-miss affair at best. The high-volatility characteristic of artists' revenues at festivals attests to the risks inherent in intuitive strategies.

So what can be done?

If you want to be sure, find out

Market Orientation/Alignment
The almost unquestioned authority of a market orientation focus in business arguably had its roots in Drucker (1954:37), who said:

There is only one valid definition of business purpose: to create a customer ... It is the customer who determines what the business is ...

If business is not the soliciting of patronage for profit, then what is it? (And I will remind the reader that we are talking about show business here.)

It then follows that show business, if it wishes to be regarded as a business, will concern itself with providing whatever it is that will optimise the extent of that customer patronage.

The literature in support of market orientation is persuasive and considerable in scope. Day (1998) claimed that a market-oriented company designs its organisation so that the company as a whole is mobilised to produce satisfied customers. "Continuous assessment of alignment is a critical activity" (Cobb et al 1998:34), which alignment is best measured through the use of market-based factors such as customer satisfaction (Day 1994; Deshpande et al 1993).

A market-oriented company, said Duboff (1992), identifies profitable customers, learns their values, analyses the offerings they need and will use, focuses its promotional efforts on them, and monitors their satisfaction.

Gale (1994:351) presented three criteria that he collectively termed "Comprehensive Alignment":

Internal Consensus: Are the employees (artists) of the company closely aligned with each other in terms of their ideas about what the customer wants?

Group Average Agreement: Is the employee's (artist's) consensus idea of how customers make a selection decision aligned with the real desires of customers in the target market?

Intended Action: Do employees (artists) know what they have to do to accomplish what they believe the customer wants?

But Gounaris & Avlonitis (2001) offered a reality check when they pointed out that the majority of companies (artists) fail to develop a market-oriented strategy despite the fact that they operate in environments that would respond well to such a strategy.

Supplementing Kohli & Jaworski (1990), who called for an organisation-wide generation and dissemination of market intelligence, Dalgic (2000) claimed that market-orientation requires that companies (artists) employ various sources of information for discovering explicit and implicit needs. Duboff & Spaeth (2000), on the other hand, made the telling observation that the majority of companies and their leaders spend very little of their energy, time and funding on market research efforts, and that market research is mostly used to support existing initiatives rather than to develop initiatives for the future.

Anticipating future trends, McKenna (1995) contended that customer satisfaction and loyalty must be won through utilising information technology to establish real-time dialogue with customers for intelligence-gathering, which is perhaps about as close to the customer and as market-oriented as a company could hope to get.

Segmentation and targeting
Neiger, Barnes, Thackeray & Lindman (2001) described two kinds of segmentation:

front-end segmentation, which incorporates demographic or geographic data to provide initial direction; and

back-end segmentation, which makes use of data from focus groups, in-depth interviews and other survey research in order to make specific segmentation decisions about the subgroup identified in the front-end segmentation.

Segmentation can be applied to extract benefits through providing direction for resource allocation (Wind 1978), keeping offerings focused on customer needs (Albrecht & Bryant 1996), guiding marketing strategy (Weinstein 1994), and tailoring customer message design (Slater 1995).

Cahill (1997) emphasised that segmentation brings a strategic focus to the company that compels the company to look realistically at its customers and also to keep its gaze fixed firmly outward on the customer.

Launching a scathing attack on segmentation as a meaningful tool, Wright (1996) highlighted the fact that there is little evidence in support of the claim that segments are associated with a stable set of consumer preferences, or that segmentation and targeting gives a higher return than mass marketing. Cahill (1997) added a note of common sense by arguing that as long as sales in the target segment are higher than lost sales in the untargeted segment, segmentation contributes positively to company profitability.

And here is an important point: there is no obligation on any artist to target the largest segment. Indeed, there are many times when a conscious effort is made precisely to target a small, niche market. But market research enables the provider, whether for niche or mass markets, to gauge the size, price-sensitivity and overall utility bias of the preferred segment, and so really to reach it.

The performing arts and marketing
Confirming the claim made by Rentschler (2002) that research literature concerned with customer-focused marketing is evidencing greater cogitation than ever before, Kotler (1999) observed that arts organisations have been transformed into experience-centred institutions with a focus on audience needs, and even - at the risk of raising a condescending eyebrow of marketing researchers active in non-arts-related industries - incorporate human needs into mission statements. My somewhat facetious tone must be forgiven in this instance, as it is intended to emphasise the embryonic status of performing arts marketing and how far behind non-arts industries arts marketing finds itself.

Nevertheless the literature confirms that the tide is turning and that performing arts marketing is beginning to look for strategies to maintain a relationship with and gain commitment from its audiences (Silverman, 1995).

Conclusion
It is a common misconception that "giving the audience what it wants" will result in a diminution of standards, taste or quality. Recent multivariate research at the KKNK 2004 revealed that if the management of that festival gave the theatre-going audiences more of what they really wanted, as opposed to what the management thought they wanted, the festival program would have been more sophisticated than it was, not less. Now there's a thought.

Many statistical techniques are available to aid those performing artists who wish to determine the key purchasing patterns and drivers of audiences. Knowledge is power. At the very least, market research can enable even the most disdainful artist to estimate how small his or her audience is going to be, and so to budget accordingly (unless, of course, he or she has a never-ending access to subsidies or charity).

Employing the marketing principles discussed in this essay does not mean you will always be right. You will, however, be wrong less often. Being right more often than you are wrong is the better path to survival. And besides, even fishermen know that the bait you use is determined by the type of fish you want to catch. With the wrong bait, or no bait at all ... "Excuse me, you don't perhaps know of a restaurant that needs a waiter, do you?"

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*Deon Opperman's career as a playwright, director and producer of theatre, film and television began in 1984. To date he has written 40 professionally produced plays in both Afrikaans and English. He has directed and produced over 50 theatre productions in every major theatre and at every major festival in South Africa. He has also directed and written extensively for television.

Mr Opperman is a Fulbright Scholar, and has a BA degree from Rhodes University, a BA Honours degree from UCT, and an MA from Northwestern University, Chicago; he is currently in his final year at the Wits Business School, where he is reading towards a Master of Business Administration degree.

In 1996 he served as a founding director of AFDA: The South African School of Motion Picture and Live Performance - a private tertiary institution with campuses in Johannesburg and Cape Town, offering degrees in Motion Picture Medium and Live Performance. AFDA is acknowledged by the Council on Higher Education as a unique tertiary institution in South Africa. It is the only independent tertiary institution in South Africa that awards fully-accredited degrees in outcomes-based higher learning exclusively in the field of motion picture and live performance.

Mr Opperman is currently the CEO and majority shareholder of Tanstaafl Holdings (Pty) Ltd, which holds a controlling share in four companies and an associate share in the AFDA: The South African School of Motion Picture Medium and Live Performance.

Over the years he has received the following awards:

The South African Academy of Science & Art: Eugene Marais Award for Literature

Standard Bank Young Artist of the Year Award

Kanna Award for Innovation and Contribution to Afrikaans Theatre

8 Vita Awards for various achievements in playwriting, directing, acting or producing

Fleur du Cap Award for Best New South African Play

EP Herald Showtime Award for Best Director

SACPAC Playwright of the Year Award.

He was also nominated for the Hertzog Prize for Literature.

LitNet: 10 September 2004

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