Tackling Inside-Out Thinking in the Arts Management

Tackling Inside-Out Thinking in the Arts Management

In recent decades, many art institutions have paid more attention and resources to increasing audience participation in their activities and core offerings. For many institutes, participatory activities and audience engagement has become one of the leading marketing and service issues. Despite the growing interest in audience participation and participation research, the customer-centric phenomenon as a whole has remained unexplored.

For majority of cultural institutions various canon-based (product-led), community-based (target-led) and creativity-based (artist-led) purposes and strategies are dominant, while audience-based thinking and customer context is missing or underrepresented in the strategic core. The Inside-Out management has been over-emphasized in many cultural institutions as the canon of art, artworks and artists have been raised on the podium, while many have considered the audience as observers–consumers who come and enjoy. Such a mindset is consistent with the traditional approach to economics and service design, where Inside-Out management focuses primarily on costs before customers and their needs. 

Nevertheless, for years, there has been a strong emphasis in the business and marketing field towards consumer research and experience design, which has also affected the way some cultural institutions now value audience experience and participation. Most of these cultural institutions, however, still take the perspective of organization without having a deep focus on the customer perspective, in which case the audience and their expectations and motivations remain unclear. 

In response, to be successful in engaging new audiences, the Outside-In management should be the priority and a base for audience-based thinking. Cultural organizations looking for new audiences and audience engagement (and most probably new revenue models) should, first of all, see the importance of understanding values and meanings behind participation and consumer engagement. The ability to understand customers’ decision-making processes and a consumer context as such, makes it possible for arts organizations to develop their core offerings, marketing and service processes. 

To conclude, audience-based thinking and customer focus means understanding the customer context and customer expectations, which makes successful management and services possible. To put it another way, the knowledge of audience expectations and the management of these expectations are essential for the success of organizations.

This writing is based on the thesis "Managing the Art Experience: The Leadership Perspective on Audience Participation and Participation Building" (Saarikorpi P. 2020)