Archive for the ‘Marketing’ Category

Play nicely with others! It seems that everywhere I go experts are talking about the benefits of collaboration, sharing and smart partnerships. I’ve recently attended two excellent and very different events: Webstock and an arts marketing workshop with international cultural facilitator Jerry Yoshitomi. However, a key message from both events was the value and importance of collaboration to help build your business or your audience.

One of the most recent examples of a successful collaboration in the cultural and tourism communities is the development of the Manaaki Card. The card is a discount card for tourists that includes a variety of Māori cultural activities, accommodation, arts and other wonderful tourism experiences.

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For the Wellington Phoenix, 2007 was potentially more like a burning building than a fiery rebirth, and if you just look at the results, then the former is possibly quite fitting. It’s been a long hard road for the Wellington Phoenix thanks largely to the failures of their predecessors. The Kings were in constant disarray, and the Knights were little better.

However, if you want to get into comparisons – and I do – then the first year of The Phoenix has been a flaming success (alright, I’ll stop with the fire metaphors now).

Why a success you ask? Well, I’ll give you two little words – business smarts.

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We’ve got two tickets to give away for the massive 2008 Big Day Out Festival, which is shaping up to be one of the most exciting and diverse yet. From Bjork to Billy Bragg to Brand New – we reckon they’ve got it covered this year.

To enter the draw, all you need to do is sign up to receive our monthly newsletter by sending us an email to competitions@nzlive.com.

Last week Big Day Out made their latest announcement of acts to join the impressive line-up. The new additions to Big Day Out 2008 are:

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Check out this graph from an article on eMarketer about ‘The rising roar of word-of-mouth’. More and more, people are influenced by friends, family and also strangers over other promotional channels when they make decisions about what to buy and where to go. Click on the image to see a larger version of the graph. It means we can’t underestimate the value of promoting our services and activities using testimonials, reviews and commentary from our audiences.

Rules can be handy. Here’s a quick read from the BBC - their fifteen web principles. I like the fact that they remind us that it’s not just all about me and my website, but about taking and giving, linking and feeding, across the web.

Finally, a link to Alan Brown’s article on Fuel4Arts outlining his framework for the value of the arts. It’s a great piece of work - I won’t attempt to summarise it here - read the article instead, or cast your eye over the short summary on Creative New Zealand’s website (where you can also listen to a webcast with Alan). At a seminar in Wellington last month, Alan directed his arguments to both marketers and arts managers, arguing that his framework provides a common language for explaining the benefits and values of our programmes to our audiences and to our sponsors. He strikes a great balance between reminding us that the number one reason people attend arts events is to relax and have fun (and that we should design our programmes to be more relevant to these people’s needs and this social context) with his obvious belief in the value of the art itself:

Being completely absorbed in an arts activity is at the root of everything and without it, you can’t reap the other benefits.

I couldn’t resist posting a photo of my puppy, Baxter, who grabbed my conference registration when I unpacked my bags … Further sessions from the conference Eventing the Future 2007 (see also previous post) revealed tips for developing memorable experiences and marketing to your target audience.

Memorable experiences

Robert Rossman, author and consultant on recreation programme design, presented on ‘creating experiences’. Rober cited research that shows that humans are happiest when they are able to exercise their individual strengths and abilities. If we want to create successful events, we need to design experiences that make humans happy. He argued that in an environment where it is increasingly difficult to complete on price, quality and delivery, we need to compete on creating memorable experiences.

Robert said we need to look at events as ‘a series of social interactions staged to engage participants in a memorable way’. Your audience will value the social interaction that your event produces and the memories that it creates. To design memorable experiences, events managers need to:

• maximize opportunities for participants to make choices – not just the choice to attend the event, but options within it
• ensure participation in activities that are intrinsically satisfying (where the reward comes from the ‘doing’)
• engage participants by allowing them to play a part in determining and directing the outcome of the event.

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