WHAT COMES NEXT? ARTS MARKETING WHEN NOTHING IS ENOUGH.

 

WHAT COMES AFTER SPECTACULARISATION AND EXPERIENCE ECONOMY?

For years, cultural research has followed the research on economics and service and their focus on consumers. Digging deeper, service thinking and institution-centric view have been dominant in both classic service and cultural research, as academic researchers have emphasized provider-audience interactions and customer needs defined by the service provider.

Due to digital jump, new forms of cultural consumption and consumer movements have increased during the recent decades, and shifted to digital and social media platforms. A cultural movement toward new forms of collective creativity and audience engagement has steered art organizations to explore audience experiences and audience participation even deeper. This has led many art organizations towards experience design models, with a focus on experimentation, spectacularisation and eventualisation, and has influenced the idea of experience economy which has become the leading marketing strategy for many art organizations.

WHAT IF SPECTACULAR IS NOT SPECTACULAR ENOUGH?

In many art organizations, the institutional logic seems to be based on the ideal of the autonomy and superiority of the arts, or the idea of art as a tool in societal issues, with a strong focus on institutional values, purposes and practices before audiences.

Despite the growing interest in audience participation and participatory activities based on experience economy, art organizations, in many respects, have lacked the audience perspective, as the performance setting and institutional context of art have been dominant. In this sense, art organizations have not been

successful in formulating practices that support participation, behavior or experience from the audience perspective, and the audience-centric activities as a whole have remained unexplored. Although experience economy's emphasis on customers' social bond and a sense of belonging has given rise to the social engagement, participatory experiences and participation economy in the arts, there are some shortcomings in this logic.

For some, a spectacular performance may be a once in a lifetime experience, but it does not necessarily provide a lasting relationship between the audience and the organization, which should, however, be the main goal in arts marketing. The experience economy seems to be a cycle in which expectations grow and must be exceeded time and time again. The emphasis on experience economy has raised the question of what happens if spectacular is not enough – when nothing is enough!

The challenges for many art organizations seem to lie in marketing, reaching new audiences, and competing for their attention. For most of them, the answer should not be on experience economy. Instead, the primary questions in arts marketing should be:

1. How could an art organization be relevant to its audience?
2. How could an art organization play a role in people's everyday lives?

THE NEXT BIG THING IN ARTS MARKETING: CUSTOMER LOGIC

In contrast to traditional arts marketing, where the focus has been on the institution-centric view or direct interactions and co-creation between the organization and the audience, audience experience should also be understood from the customer context, where many of the processes are invisible to the art organization. There is clearly a need to expand the scope of arts marketing and provide art institutions new perspectives in understanding the customer experience and the customer ecosystem in relation to value formation. In order to engage customers, art organizations need to acknowledge how to become involved in customers' contexts, activities and experiences rather than focusing on institutional values, practices and already existing services. Understanding customer context and customer logic is essential in future arts marketing and in the end, leads toward a customer-centric management and a perspective of the customer primacy over the organization.

Instead of managing experimentation, spectacularisation and eventualisation, art organizations should focus on various customer contexts and the role of organizations in people's everyday lives. Understanding customer logic provides a meaningful way for arts organizations to be relevant with their audiences.

In short, understanding the customer logic and its relationship to audience experiences should be the next big thing in arts marketing.

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Pekka Saarikorpi is an art school principal and cultural manager. Saarikorpi's MA thesis (2020; Social Sciences) explored audience participation and audience experience in Finnish art organizations. Saarikorpi's doctoral research at Hanken School of Economics focuses on temporal framework of an art experience and customer-dominant logic.