PREVIOUS FEATURED ARTICLES 
5/15/2012
Authored by Tim Baker and Steven Roth
When talking about price, it’s often easy to overlook one of the most important of prices: FREE! ‘Free’ can be an incredibly powerful tool for generating demand, but may create more challenges than it addresses. This is particularly true for the arts.
From a customer’s perspective, there’s no better price than ’free’. ‘Free’ alters the relationship between a product’s price and the volume of...
5/3/2012
Some time ago, I was at the box office when a major donor who lives out of town came up to the window. I instantly recognized her even though she hadn't visited us in quite some time. After warmly welcoming her back, I stepped away briefly to attend to another matter, and when I returned to continue our conversation, I was startled to see that she was being charged an exchange fee to transfer into another performance. When I inquired, the box office associate rightly told me that she wasn't a...
4/17/2012
How many times have you heard that the arts need a new business model or that subscriptions are dead? There's not a lot of people out there advocating for subscriptions. In fact most speak of abandoning it or make conclusions or assumptions based on reports that the number of arts subscribers in America is down.
But is the subscription model really dead? Really? The fact is, subscriptions are thriving in industries outside of the arts. In the past few months, there have been a slew of articles...
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4/4/2012
Every organization has a website and I don't need to go over how important a good website is to your organization's identity as well as ticket sales and contributions. However, we can always make our websites better. Here are some rules to help arts organization websites be the best that they can be:
1. Your Homepage Is Key: Your website homepage is the most important page on your website. Think of it as the first step in turn-by-turn driving directions. When people arrive at your site, you...
3/14/2012
Authored by Tim Baker and Steven Roth
As compelling as we find the study of behavioral economics, you just can't escape the logic of supply and demand that is the basis of classical economics.
Ultimately, people do pay more for seats or events that are in high demand. Some arts marketers take advantage of this situation by tinkering with supply. They may hold some seats off sale in order to better manage demand; for example, holding the last week of a run off sale to fill seats...
3/1/2012
If I show you this, do you know what it is?
I imagine you probably do. It's the constellation Orion, sitting there, above you, in the sky right now. It rises up from the low horizon this time of year to take a more prominent place, an hourglass with a girdle against the black sky.
That's how most people see Orion, just those seven points of light. But actually, if you look, they're more.I'm on vacation in Hawaii right now, taking a quick break before jumping headlong into the next six months...
2/9/2012
Authored by Tim Baker and Steven RothThe most expensive concert of the last two years was Sting's 25th Anniversary / 60th Birthday Concert. Price: $1,073.83. That's not so surprising. Major star gives unique performance with limited availability, price goes through the roof. That's supply and demand.
Number two was a Rod Stewart concert in Las Vegas, going for $784. But then at number five, there's Rod Stewart again, at $631.50 and his Las Vegas residency appears several more times in the top...
2/1/2012
There has been a lot of controversy over the past couple of weeks concerning Google's new privacy policies. No matter how they change, Google is the largest, most powerful advertising system in the world. Have you ever wondered how ads show up next to your search results? How do they choose what ads you'll see? Most importantly, how can you get your organization in front of potential audience members' based on their search results?
With AdWords, you can choose where your ad appears, set a...
1/19/2012
Introspection in business encourages the sharing of best practices within an industry, and the National Arts Marketing Project is a prime example of this.
But benchmarking can be even more valuable - in other words, probing other industries to determine their best functional practices that inform one's own special needs. For example, how the customer service standards of Nordstrom's can influence auto dealership service protocols, how Disney's devotion to "exceeding expectations" has...
1/5/2012
"Pack your shorts!"Picture this: you are sitting outside having a pleasant mid-festival meeting with your boss when she says, "Pack your shorts, because you're going to San Jose!" If you'd cry tears of joy, it's OK because that's exactly what I did. (Don't laugh, I was excited.)
A few weeks later I was sitting in a conference room in California listening to arts marketing masters school us in the "new to the field" preconference clinic, then experienced a whirlwind...
