Mamdani and the Met

See audience strategy from the demand side

Your go-to source for audience insight, consumer trends, business model strategy, and fresh thinking on what drives relevance, demand, and growth in the arts.

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Why Is It So Hard to Change an Arts Organization's Business Model?

The Phoenix Symphony grew its revenue 18% and still suspended its season. When financial improvements aren’t enough, the problem may be the business model itself, and the business model is built to resist change.

Audience Segmentation for Arts Organizations: A Complete Guide

Learn how arts organizations can use need-based audience segmentation to identify consumer demand, personalize marketing, and measure impact.

The wrong starting point

What if today’s arts sector is built on the wrong theory of demand?

Oracle saved the Nashville Symphony’s season. Now comes the harder part.

Oracle saved the Nashville Symphony’s season. Now comes the hard part: getting an organization full of people with different priorities, experiences, and beliefs to move forward together.

Mamdani and the Met: What the Metropolitan Opera Could Learn From Its Newest Patrons

By partnering with NYC, the Met gains access to a broad network already connected to millions of New Yorkers outside its normal customer base. But there's a second opportunity here, and it could matter more than access.

Can Gustavo Dudamel Save Classical Music?

The New York Times’ weekend episode of The Daily has a bold headline: Classical Music Is in Crisis. Gustavo Dudamel Is Here to Save It. That’s an enormous amount of pressure on one single person.

This is not a website redesign

At first glance, these two screenshots look like a before-and-after website redesign. But what you’re really seeing is a change in how an orchestra understands the value it creates.

How arts organizations win in a billion-dollar attention economy

We'll never win the fight for attention with budget or spectacle. But understanding the human experience? That's how we win against massive brands and big tech.

What Gartner just confirmed: active personalization beats passive.

Personalization without genuine customer understanding, says Gartner, can backfire. The solution? active personalization.

2.9x Ticket Conversions: When Marketing Starts with Patron Need

Can need-based intelligence increase engagement and drive higher ticket sales? A 16-week controlled test at the New Bedford Symphony.

Why Customer-Centered Thinking Keeps Getting Pulled Back Into the Status Quo

This happens a lot. A demand-side insight surfaces in the sector, and the product-centric model absorbs it back into the same logic it's always run on.

The Boston Symphony Orchestra's Real Crisis Has Nothing to Do with Andris Nelsons

BSO's 40% audience decline isn't a conductor problem or a financial problem. It's a business model problem. Here's what the data says—and why no conductor search fixes it.

The Wrong Trousers: What the Met Opera’s Crisis Reveals About Strategy in the Arts

The Met is in the New York Times again, searching for another solution to its financial crisis. This time, they brought in BCG.

Built for a Different World: The Arts Sector Business Model Problem

Arts organizations aren't naturally resistant to change. But it feels that way, right? And it’s all too easy to assume that it’s a leadership problem. But it’s the model that creates inertia.

The sentence that unlocks board engagement

The moment you frame the sector's problems as structural, your board stops offering tactical fixes and starts asking the right questions.

What if arts patrons aren’t “different”

What if arts patrons aren't inherently different? What if the traditional arts model makes them behave differently?

Zero-Party Data: How arts organizations win in a privacy-first world

We’re living through the biggest data shift in 20 years, and it's forcing a reckoning for arts leaders: know your audience deeply, or lose them to organizations that do.

Your stewardship strategy is killing your moment-based giving

CEO: Ok, our stewardship is dialed in. Appreciation events, welcome gifts, the works. But donations are stuck. What’s your take?

New CMO: Don’t kill the messenger, but we’re playing one giving game when there are actually two.

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It’s time to speak out

These days, nearly two-thirds of consumers make purchasing decisions based on shared values. Consumers are now trying a brand for the first time solely because they agree with its position on a societal issue. That's huge.

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Egocentric marketing: How to avoid it, and why pop stars get a free pass

Without the preloaded context that mainstream culture enjoys, arts organizations don’t have the luxury of taking the easy way out in their marketing.

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The next frontier in audience development for the arts sector

Here’s a controversial call to action, but I’m sticking to it.

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Where the opera is grand, and so is the style: The power of autonomy

Consumers feel more certain in their decision-making process—more ready to pull the trigger—when they’ve had the opportunity to reject one characteristic in favor of another.

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A paradigm shift for arts marketing

Here's a powerful paradigm shift culled from business theory for arts organizations struggling with audience decline.

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The marketing strategy that fueled Intercom’s stunning growth

A software company tailored their marketing strategy to correspond with the phases of the customer journey. The results were extraordinary.

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Before you pull the trigger on that gorgeous video ad

Before you pull the trigger on that gorgeous video ad; before you click "send" on that brilliant social media campaign; ask yourself this one simple question.

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The perfect homepage? Opera Australia is in the running.

Before I saw Opera Australia’s website, I was pretty certain that a truly customer centric homepage did not exist in the arts sector.

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What’s NOT trending in 2022? The ivory tower.

This is how you build brand loyalty, and The Philadelphia Orchestra is nailing it.

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6 assumptions arts organizations are getting wrong across the industry

It’s time to reconsider the traditional assumptions on which the majority of arts organizations base their marketing and strategy.

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What does Spirit Airlines have to do with arts marketing?

Make it easier for your target audiences to make a purchasing decision by clearly framing the tradeoffs.

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Does your video marketing ignore the reality of your target audiences?

Think about the last orchestra/opera/ballet commercial you watched, whether on TV or social media. Was there anything familiar or relevant for the Outsiders in that video?