It's simple: Pizza. Beer. Plays.

posted by Cheshire on Sun, Sep 2, 2007
in Marketing

When I'm telling someone about Impact for the first time -- either at street festivals or as an answer to the invariable party question, "And what do you do?" -- I usually begin by saying we're a small, nonprofit professional theatre company that performs in the basement of a pizza place. Given that most people aren't theatregoers to begin with, their eyes start to glaze over...until I tell them that they can eat pizza and drink beer while they're watching the show.

Then their eyes light up. The response after that is usually either, "Really?" or "Sweet!" (or some variant thereof).

Our tagline used to be "Theatre that doesn't suck." That appellation was bestowed upon us by the now-defunct Oakland magazine UrbanView. We liked it so much that we adopted it for our own tagline. (It can still be seen on our T-shirts.) Reaction was mixed: some people loved it, since indeed there is a lot of sucky theatre out there in the world; others felt it was too negative, especially since there is a lot of theatre, particularly here in the Bay Area, that also doesn't suck. We're friends with many of the other nonprofit companies here, and we love what they do, and we didn't want to imply that Impact was an island in a sea of suck.

So last year we decided to highlight the more positive message that not only do we do great theatre, we've been doing it for a long time now. Thus, "Kickass theatre since 1996" was born. Given that we're still very small, we've managed to pass under the radar of the great majority of east bay theatregoers, and we wanted to establish more of a presence at street festivals where people might discover us.

But what I found out was that though that message is important, what really distinguished us in the minds of people who were finding out about us for the first time was the beer and pizza aspect. Of course, Impact is much more than that, but the fact that you can eat and drink while watching the show communicates our attitude about theatre, and that, I think, is what's more likely to stick in people's minds.

The Parkway Speakeasy Theater in Oakland has it right: their website is picturepubpizza.com, and that says it all -- you can eat and drink while watching a movie. Even though Impact is older than the Parkway (by a whole six months or so), it took us quite a long time to do what they knew from the start: promote what makes you distinctive.

So with apologies and thanks to Kyle, Catherine, Will, and everyone at the Speakeasy Theaters, Impact is adopting a new tagline, which we'll be pimping relentlessly:

Pizza. Beer. Plays.

Wait till you see what we have up (and on) our sleeves...