The fake closing bait-and-switch

posted by Cheshire on Sat, Sep 29, 2007
in Marketing

Chloe Veltman, the reviewer for the SF Weekly, brought up an interesting subject on her blog this week: the post, "On Unannounced Extensions," discussed a rising trend by small theatre companies to announce shorter runs -- only to then announce an extension ("due to popular demand," of course). The rub is that the shorter run and the extension would add up to what the run would have been in the first place.

That was a little convoluted, wasn't it? OK, let me put it in Impact terms. Our runs are always six weeks long. If we were to do what Chloe is talking about, we'd instead announce a four-week run, then around week three we'd announce a two-week extension (um, "due to popular demand," of course). In the end, though, we'd have played the same six weeks we would have played in the first place.

Why would a company do this? Chloe's right on the mark when she says that audiences here are pretty procrastinating people. Impact has plenty of productions where it doesn't start selling out until weeks five or six. Closing night almost always sells out.

We actually used to do four-week runs. We changed the schedule to six-week runs because our reviews weren't coming out until the third week. Our first couple of weeks were always light, and the final two weeks were busy. So we thought, Oh, people don't start coming until the reviews come out -- let's open up the run two more weeks so we can get more people in. But then the people who were waiting until week three were now waiting until week five.

Believe me, I've thought about doing exactly what Chloe discusses. We'd hate to resort to trickery to get people to come to our shows in a timely manner, but something needs to happen. Without subscribers, we don't have a guaranteed audience in the first few weeks. For Briefs, a huge anomaly for us, we started selling out in the third week, and it never let up. Ironically, we couldn't extend for a variety of reasons. (I'm not sure why it only occurred to me now, but we should have tried to add performances on Wednesdays or Sundays to accommodate the demand. Oops.)

So should we resort to such trickery? Chloe warns that if audiences get used to such a schedule, they'll start to anticipate such fake extensions and plan accordingly. No net change. It's kind of like when you set your alarm clock five or ten minutes ahead to try to trick yourself into being on time, your brain eventually does the math and lets you sleep ten minutes longer. (My alarm clock these days is set to the actual time, by the way.)

We need to find another way to get people into the theatre early in the run. That's especially important for small theatres like Impact that don't get reviewed by the Chronicle (or even the SF Weekly or Bay Guardian, for that matter). Our shows sell largely because of word of mouth, and if there aren't people in the theatre, there aren't enough mouths to spread the word.

Any ideas? Leave 'em in the comments.