Conclusion: Revenue Opportunities for a Vertical Marketing Dance Strategy
In this final post of this series on creating a new vertical marketing strategy for dance companies, I would like to focus on the potential financial benefits of this gameplan. I outlined the key revenue opportunities in my first post about this topic on Monday. I would like to expand upon these opportunities now.
- Increased ticket sales: If a dance company is able to reach out to non-traditional dance audiences, this success will translate in to the sale of more tickets for upcoming performances. But this outreach is not limited to one specific geographical area. If the Internet is used to reach the large national audience of people within the neuroscience community, for instance, this means that the show can be brought on the road and performed in cities and towns where audiences and contacts have been developed and cultivated.
- New performance opportunities: The very nature of interdisciplinary projects that target specific market segments means that you will often be able to perform at events and venues that might not have been previously possible. Continuing with the neuroscience example, there are a large number of conferences and related events that take place throughout the US. Plus, most colleges and universities now have programs that focus on neuroscience. Since your performance would deal very directly on themes and topics of interest to this community, you would now have the opportunity to perform at these events and at these academic institutions. These performance opportunities would often not exist for dance companies without such an interdisciplinary focus--in this instance, one that combines dance and science.
- Video commissioning project: Part of this vertical marketing strategy for dancers is devoted to exploring how dancers can specifically generate revenue via the Internet as opposed to using the Internet to create revenue for offline activities. The idea behind the video commissioning project is to encourage organizations in different fields to underwrite the creation of dance videos that address specific themes and ideas related to their discipline. For example, how do we encourage commercial and not-for-profit organizations in the robotics field to commission dancers to create dance videos that relate in some manner to robotics. Dancers and dance companies would be commissioned to create these videos, which would be distributed through multiple online channels.
Individual Action Good; Collective Action Even Better
Dancers and dance companies can pursue the above opportunities on their own. But given the newness of this approach, collective action on the part of dance companies, presenters and others in the dance community may prove very worthwhile and, in some instances, easier to implement.
Consider the following scenario for an online/offline dance festival. In 2009, we decided to host a multi-day dance festival focused on robotics. During this event, 10 dancers/dance companies would perform works that dealt directly or indirectly with ideas from the latest developments in robotics. At the same time, we hosted an online dance video commission project where these and other dance companies were selected to create robotic-inspired performance video works for online distribution.
Sponsors would have to be found to support both the online and offline components. And considerable thought would have to be given to developing non-traditional dance audiences from the robotics field. But if this type of event were successful, then it could be replicated for a huge number of other fields.
While there are clearly obstacles to overcome, there are a number of elements for this online/offline festival that are very positive from the beginning:
1) Robotics is a very diverse, intriguing field with many new developments and inventions taking place on an on-going basis. So many ideas for choreographers and dancers to explore.
2) Corporate and organizational sponsors from the robotics field will be pretty much ensured of a large audience given the considerable reach of Internet distribution for these dance videos.
3) Sponsors will be underwriting art that specifically addresses the work and research they are engaged in.
4) The potential audience for the dance performance includes anybody and everybody involved in and interested in robotics which includes students in science and technology programs, practitioners, researchers, teachers and others.
Feedback
I would be delighted to get reader feedback about my proposed vertical marketing strategy for dance companies.
Posted by
Doug Fox on June 6, 2008 8:50 AM
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3 Comments
Hi Doug,
Thanks for this series. It raises many interesting ideas for consideration, some of which you have expounded on before in earlier posts. I think that the concept of targeting a niche market, or any market at all is a very foreign to most dance-makers. That concept comes from the business world, but artists very rarely think that way. That's not to say they shouldn't be encouraged to! On the contrary, I think this is a very important initiative you are proposing. For it to catch on, however, I think that it will require a multi-pronged effort on your part to reach out to the dance community and treat them as a "niche market" in many of the same ways you are suggesting they do with non-dancers. Certainly the video-commissioning project is a great idea of how to do this. Dancers will respond to opportunities to make work. Your hypothetical dance festival idea with underwriters from the robotics field is also a great idea of how to merge two different fields together over similar interests. The difficulty is that you aren't just trying to convince one group of people, but two groups! All the power to you!!
Anna, there are some challenges as you point out.
In this series, I've been discussing marketing. But I think that from dance-maker perspective, there are many instances where dance artists have collaborated in an interdisciplinary fashion with people from other fields, and, in some cases, the results of these partnerships have been to reach people who otherwise would not have been exposed to dance. So, there has been this type of niche-focus before although it's probably not been considered an example of marketing.
One example would be Liz Lerman Dance Exchange's Ferocious Beauty: Genome in which Lerman and her company collaborated with biologists in the creation and development of this work, and biology students, professors and researchers were among the audiences.
But the existence of these types of interdisciplinary projects does not mean that there isn't a need to market to both groups (dancers and non-dancers) as you write.
This process is challenging and the hardest part is in the beginning when it is tougher to get buy-in from the trailblazers. So that's what I'm working on now.
I wonder if art should fit the logic of the market or SMASH it.
Might dance not be our potion?
The Potion
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