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Spontaneity and Planning in Arts Attendance: Insights from Qualitative Interviews and the Audience Finder Database
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The articles in this special issue present some of the early findings of Understanding Everyday Participation – Articulating Cultural Values (UEP), a five-year large grant project, which began in 2012 and is part of the Arts and Humanities Research Council’s Connected Communities programme, receiving supplementary funding from Creative Scotland. The project starts from the proposition that the orientation of cultural policy and state-funded cultural programming
towards cultural participation and value is in need of a radical overhaul. We argue that there is an orthodoxy of approach to cultural engagement which is based on a narrow definition (and understanding) of participation, one that focuses on a limited set of cultural forms, activities and associated cultural institutions but which, in the process, obscures the significance of other forms of cultural participation which are situated locally in the everyday realm.
This article explores different ways of representing and understanding cultural participation. It employs multiple correspondence analysis to look at the clustering of participation using data from the “Taking Part” survey and uses qualitative material from participation narratives to address the meanings attached to participation and cultural engagement. The authors show that contemporary lifestyles are strongly demarcated around both the fact and the nature of participation and that the clustering of particular types of activity and inactivity shows quite clearly that not taking part in highbrow cultural activities is the norm. They go on to argue that the “deficit” model of culture employed by government is unhelpful, as what matters for health and well-being appears to be participation per se and that more work is therefore required to understand the value and significance of informal and everyday cultural practices. Nevertheless, given the continuing role of culture in the inter-generational transmission of economic and social inequalities, they also call for policies to promote cultural “omnivorousness” and tackle disengagement.
Interpretative phenomenological analysis (IPA) is an increasingly popular approach to qualitative inquiry. This handy text covers its theoretical foundations and provides a detailed guide to conducting IPA research.
Extended worked examples from the authors' own studies in health, sexuality, psychological distress and identity illustrate the breadth and depth of IPA research.
Each of the chapters also offers a guide to other good exemplars of IPA research in the designated area. The final section of the book considers how IPA connects with other contemporary qualitative approaches like discourse and narrative analysis and how it addresses issues to do with validity. The book is written in an accessible style and will be extremely useful to students and researchers in psychology and related disciplines in the health and social sciences.
Consumer behavior recently underwent three main developments: a shift from material purchases to immaterial experiences, a shift from signaling status and wealth by means of consumer behavior to signaling identity, and increased social visibility due to the growing importance of social media. These trends did arouse a renewed interest in the concept of conspicuous consumption in the area of experiential purchases. Seven different types of experiential purchases are compared as regards the role of conspicuous consumption: the main summer holiday and participation in six different types of cultural events. In the culture study, the same measurement tools were used as in the leisure study. It was found that conspicuous consumption plays a role in these types of purchases. This holds true for status demonstration as well as for identity demonstration. However, there are substantial differences between the different types of cultural events. Conspicuous consumption is important to those who attend festivals, classical music concerts, and pop concerts and is of minor importance as regards going to movies. Based on these findings, we propose a tentative theory about the relationship between conspicuous consumption and type of experiential purchase. Practical implications for marketing are sketched out. In cultural marketing for museums, the performing arts, and cinema, attention should be paid not only to the quality of the event for the self-experience, but also to its status and identity-signaling potential to relevant others.
This article responds to the arts policy and research call for better understandings of arts audiences—actual and potential. The authors report on the application of Dervin's Sense-Making Methodology (SMM) to audience research. SMM is an approach developed specifically for providing data useful to informing policies and practices of institutions mandated to serve publics. We review the narrative themes that have emerged from our analyses of accounts of cultural experiences by several hundred informants, and we offer five sample applications that illustrate potentials and their implications for arts policy and practice.
Purpose
Operatic events are an important sector of the performing arts industry and are currently facing the challenges of decreasing demand and price-based competition from other sectors of the performing arts industry. It is posited that adding value and ensuring satisfaction may enhance consumer loyalty, and therefore, the likelihood of sales and continued subscriptions may be increased. The purpose of this paper is to examine bundling as a marketing management technique for opera companies and hypothesises that offering attractive “package deals” that bundle various benefits with the seat ticket may increase participation and loyalty.
Design/methodology/approach
A discrete choice experiment with opera patrons is used to evaluate the application of bundling to improve increased demand and loyalty.
Findings
It is concluded that offering bundles creates a greater likelihood of customer satisfaction and favourable behavioural intentions, which may lead to increased loyalty. Participants expressed strong support for value-added elements. Such package deals included a variety of elements: opportunity for a visit backstage to meet the cast, informative introductions to operas and facilitated parking options. Consumers’ level of overall willingness to purchase a bundle was altered based on the attributes that made up that bundle. The findings of this research confirm that the theory of bundling can be applied to arts marketing and provides support for the development of bundling strategies to enhance opera attendance.
Research limitations/implications
It is recognised that the research needs to be tested in different countries in order to know the extent to which the findings of this study can be generalised. Additionally, future research could use other statistical methods such as regression and structural equation modelling to holistically model behaviour. Finally, as well as testing customer-stated intentions, the model also needs to be tested with actual patronage behaviour following the development and application of bundling strategies. Future research could also consider how bundling and other aspects relating to opera attendance could be used as part of the branding strategy associated with opera attendance; in particular how to develop, increase and maintain loyalty and therefore brand resonance in opera attendees.
Practical implications
The findings have useful implications for event organisers and policymakers and suggest bundling strategies that could be utilised. It is has been found that loyalty can be enhanced by adding value and ensuring satisfaction, and therefore, increase the likelihood of sales and repeat purchase.
Social implications
Opera represents a significant cultural heritage and is a valuable component of the performing arts, both historically and currently. Opera is a form of art whose survival is threatened by an increasingly diminished audience whose average age is steadily increasing. This decrease in audience attendance has led to radical changes in the management and marketing of opera houses, where theaters have moved increasingly towards a business-oriented model where improved branding and bundling strategies can be utilised.
Originality/value
This makes a theoretical contribution by advancing performing arts research and furthering the notion that bundling can increase the likelihood of opera attendance, satisfaction, ongoing loyalty, and also addresses a managerial need of an arts marketing organisation.
This article provides an overview of the key findings of the research project, Understanding Audiences for the Contemporary Arts, a collaboration between the Sheffield Performer and Audience Research Centre (SPARC) and Birmingham Contemporary Music Group (BCMG). The project investigated the experiences of audiences for ‘contemporary’ work across art forms (craft, dance, music, theatre and visual art), and helped develop a collaborative network of contemporary arts organisations in Birmingham. This article provides an account of the distinctive research design employed during the eight months of collaboration in Birmingham and a summary of the project’s six main findings. The paper indicates the implications these findings have for organisations presenting contemporary work and how they might widen and deepen relationships with audiences. It concludes by suggesting the need to move beyond the prevailing vocabularies and conceptualizations of audience ‘access’ and ‘barriers’, and for researchers and cultural organisations to instead address the varieties of participation and the possibilities of ‘cultural citizenship’.
This article makes an argument for a ‘qualitatively driven’ approach to mixing methods. It focuses on the value of mixed-methods approaches for researching questions about social experience and lived realities. It suggests that ‘qualitative thinking’ is a useful starting point for mixing methods, but that it is ultimately more helpful to think in terms of multi-dimensional research strategies that transcend or even subvert the so-called qualitative-quantitative divide. Mixing methods helps us to think creatively and ‘outside the box’, to theorize beyond the micro-macro divide, and to enhance and extend the logic of qualitative explanation. Mixed-methods approaches raise challenges in reconciling different epistemologies and ontologies, and in integrating different forms of data and knowledge. The article argues that we should think more in terms of ‘meshing’ or ‘linking’ than ‘integrating’ data and method. It goes on to argue for the development of ‘multi-nodal’ dialogic explanations that allow the distinctiveness of different methods and approaches to be held in creative tension. The article concludes with a discussion of qualitatively derived principles for mixing methods.
Recent thinking within arts philosophy has moved further and further away from the concept of autonomous art. Nowadays art is mostly seen as an intrinsic part of everyday human life. Artistic value is conceived of more and more as something that depends largely upon experiencing the works as they are encountered within general culture. This relational perspective on art has important implications for the future development of arts marketing as a discipline. This article argues that arts marketing should primarily aim to support and reinforce the artistic functioning of artworks. It proposes that art consumers should be seen as co‐producers in the total art process and advocates that arts marketing should focus on the artistic experience as the core customer value.
This paper defines hedonic consumption as those facets of consumer behavior that relate to the multisensory, fantasy and emotive aspects of product usage experience. After delineating these concepts, their theoretical antecedents are traced, followed by a discussion of differences between the traditional and hedonic views, methodological implications of the latter approach, and behavioral propositions in four substantive areas relevant to hedonic consumption-mental constructs, product classes, product usage and individual differences. Conclusions concern the usefulness of the hedonic perspective in supplementing and extending marketing research on consumer behavior.
Market orientation has received a large amount of attention in the marketing literature but product centred marketing has largely been ignored. Many studies have found that market orientation is positively linked with improved performance but others have shown that the relationship is tentative at best. The arts have long been a domain where product and artist centred marketing have been practiced successfully. This paper explores the debate surrounding the art for art's sake versus art for business sake philosophies found within the industry, with particular emphasis on the visual arts. Drawing on Hirschman's seminal 1983 paper on artistic ideology and aesthetics, the paper considers the merits and implications of being prepared to ignore market demand and customer wishes. Although many of the issues are specific to the arts, there are also lessons for the wider marketing community of researchers and practitioners.
This paper aims to contribute to an understanding of the marketing/creativity interface in the visual arts at the level of the individual artist. Proceeding, broadly speaking, from a constructivist perspective and using a qualitative case study approach, it examines a visual artist's personal construction of her creative and business work. The analysis highlights the significance of emotional, cognitive, spiritual and physical processes for the artist's positioning, process, and products, as well as her difficulties with promotion and pricing issues. It was seen, following Fillis (2004), that, at the level of an individual artist, her work may be not only product‐oriented but self‐oriented. It therefore behoves artists and their agents to be able to offer appropriately distinguishing promotional accounts of the artist's artistic identity, process and work based on a deep self‐reflexive awareness and understanding by the artist of her own creative practice.
Copyright © 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Stop re-inventing the wheel
- T Baker
Baker, T. (2000/2007). Stop re-inventing the wheel. Hartford, CT: Connecticut Commission on Culture
and Tourism. Retrieved from http://culturehive.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/Stop-Reinventing-the-Wheel-Guide-to-Classical-Music-Audiences.pdf
When Going Gets Tough: Barriers and Motivations Affecting Arts Attendance
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Blume-Kohout, M. E., Leonard, S. R., & Novak-Leonard, J. L. (2015). When Going Gets Tough: Barriers
and Motivations Affecting Arts Attendance. Washington, DC: National Endowment for the Arts.
Retrieved from: https://www.arts.gov/sites/default/files/when-going-gets-tough-revised2.pdf
Challenging conventions in arts marketing: Experiencing the skull. Marketing the Arts: A Fresh Approach
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Bradshaw, A., Kerrigan, F., & Holbrook, M. B. (2010). Challenging conventions in arts marketing:
Experiencing the skull. Marketing the Arts: A Fresh Approach (pp. 5-17). Oxford: Routledge.
The values study: Rediscovering the meaning and value of arts participation
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Brown, A. S. (2004). The values study: Rediscovering the meaning and value of arts participation.
Retrieved from https://www.giarts.org/sites/default/files/values-study-rediscovering-the-meaningand-value-of-arts-participation.pdf
Shaping audience behaviour
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Donald, J. (2017, May 3). Shaping audience behaviour. ArtsProfessional. Retrieved from https://www.
artsprofessional.co.uk/magazine/303/case-study/shaping-audience-behaviour
When Do People Buy Event Tickets?
- Eventbrite
Eventbrite (2015, September 16). When Do People Buy Event Tickets? [blog]. Retrieved from https://
www.eventbrite.co.uk/blog/when-do-people-buy-event-tickets-ds00/
Making the most of market forces
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https://www.artsprofessional.co.uk/magazine/article/making-most-market-forces
Rebalancing our cultural capital
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