Marketing Archives

The fake closing bait-and-switch

posted by Cheshire on Sat, Sep 29, 2007

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.

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It's simple: Pizza. Beer. Plays.

posted by Cheshire on Sun, Sep 2, 2007

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.

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What makes you want to see a play?

posted by Cheshire on Sun, Mar 25, 2007

We've put up a new forum on the Splatter Board called "Questions for you," and the first question should be something you're an expert on: what makes you choose a particular play to go to?. Please help us out and give us some answers. Thanks!

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Theatre marketing: what are we not doing?

posted by Cheshire on Wed, Dec 6, 2006

Marketing is a giant mystery. If there were one magical way to attract people to a particular good or service, everyone would be doing it. Since there isn't, everyone has their own hunches about what works and doesn't work.

This problem is especially true for nonprofit theatre, no matter how big, because resources are limited. For a small company like Impact, the problem is magnified since certain avenues aren't available to us.

Advertising, for example. Ad rates are geared toward much bigger organizations than ours, organizations with more to gain from that advertising. We were approached about a year ago by a publication we'd probably be interested in advertising in, but we found that the best deal we could get still meant that the smallish ad would have to bring in 10-15 people just for us to break even on the ad, and that was with a contract that would have required us to purchase five ads or so. A lot of commitment for such a risky return.

Then there are poster and postcard drops. We used to have a service put up our posters and drop postcards around town, but it cost us quite a bit, and we weren't convinced that we were getting an appropriate return. We went back to the old way of trying to do it on our own, but it really is much more difficult than it sounds. So we compromised: we rehired the service to take care of our posters, and we try to do the postcard drops ourselves. That saves us about half the money, but we're back to the original problem of trying to find the time ourselves or find volunteers willing to walk for hours dropping postcards here and there.

We're still not convinced that the posters are really doing anything for us, but it's so difficult to let go of the idea that a show has to have a poster. I mean, that's part of the romance and lore of the theatre! And yet, the cost of the poster represents about 40 audience members. Are more than 40 people coming to the show strictly because they saw the poster?

It's more than just seeing the poster, or at least we think so; it's the repetition of the poster, the postcard, the emails, the reviews, and whatever else we can do to keep awareness of the show forefront in the minds of people who would be inclined to see it. We're fairly sure there's a cumulative effect at work, and we want to reinforce it however we can.

And like every theatre company, we also rely on word of mouth, because it seems more and more that even great reviews don't necessarily translate into sold-out houses. In post-show speeches everywhere, small companies (Impact included) ask audience members to tell their friends if they liked the show, but wouldn't they do that anyway? By asking them to do so, are we supplying a necessary reminder or are we just sounding desperate?

I wonder, though, whether there's something big that we're missing. I realize theatre isn't nearly the only game in town, and it seems like just in the past ten years or so competition with other forms of entertainment has increased quite a bit. The natural inclination in terms of marketing, whether through advertising or developing social networks, is to do more, more, more. But what? What is it that we're not doing?

I guess the thing is that we're trained to believe that marketing can actually influence someone to do or buy something. We want to think that if only we employ the mysterious magical combination of marketing efforts, we'll fill up the houses. The flip side of it is that deep down, we also feel that we shouldn't have to resort to marketing; we think that simply making great theatre ought to be enough to generate great audiences. Neither mindset, it seems, is accurate. (Or maybe both are. Can you tell I'm at a loss here?)

Funny, I began this post with the simple intention of wanting to find out how you decide what to see. Is it advertising? Reviews? Word of mouth? Loyalty to (or subscriptions to) a particular company? Something else?

I still want to know those things. But I'm also interested in hearing your thoughts about the usefulness of marketing in general. You can either email me at cheshire at impacttheatre.com or leave an answer in the comments here.

(Well, if nothing else, at least I've finally written a post that reflects what I've wanted this blog to be about: longer thoughts on what it takes to create small theatre, in addition to the usual blog fodder of short news and other things we think you should check out. Hope you like the shift.)

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