Abstract
ABSTRACTArts managers frequently use customer relationship management systems to identify early and late ticket bookers, but to date there has been no comparable investigation of spontaneity and planning through qualitative academic audience research. This paper combines two radically different datasets to draw new insights into booking patterns of audiences for contemporary arts events. Quantitative data from Audience Finder has been analysed to look for trends in early and late booking amongst audiences for contemporary art forms. Qualitative data has been drawn from the Understanding Audiences for the Contemporary Arts study, which used in-depth individual interviews to investigate the contemporary arts attendance of audience members in four UK cities. Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis was then used to draw out insights about where the purchasing point sits within the longer decision to attend. Following a review of marketing and audience research literature on the decision to attend, we present the findings from each of these analyses, looking at moments where they confirm, supplement, contradict, or say something completely outside the remit of the other dataset. We show how the timescale of the decision to attend is influenced by (1) art form conventions and price, (2) geographical region and availability of the arts, (3) attending arts events with companions, and (4) personal preference for planning or spontaneously choosing activities. We end by suggesting a new three-part model for understanding booking patterns, and considering how these insights might be acted upon by arts organisations.
Highlights
Arts organisations typically encourage audiences to book tickets early; this strategy is often key to ensuring a large audience for an event, and means that arts managers are less reliant on walk-up attenders to ensure they break even
We investigate the booking patterns of arts audiences as evidenced in two radically different datasets: Audience Finder booker data, a national dataset of transactional booking data from venues across England; and qualitative interview data from Understanding Audiences for the Contemporary Arts (UACA) project
The mixture of quantitative ticket sales data and qualitative interview data in this paper enable us to tease out the relationship between intention, ticket purchase and attendance
Summary
Arts organisations typically encourage audiences to book tickets early; this strategy is often key to ensuring a large audience for an event, and means that arts managers are less reliant on walk-up attenders to ensure they break even. While the decision to attend has been explored in many previous audience development projects (McCarthy & Jinnett, 2001; Wiggins, 2004), little is known about the factors that influence early or late ticket-booking amongst arts audiences. Whilst much analysis is done of transactional data within the sector (by organisations such as The Audience Agency, TRG, Baker Richards, Purple Seven, Spektrix and individual venues), typically this analysis is not made available as part of the academic literature, nor is it sector-wide in its perspective and cross-referenced with large-scale qualitative analysis. We investigate the booking patterns of arts audiences as evidenced in two radically different datasets: Audience Finder booker data, a national dataset of transactional booking data from venues across England; and qualitative interview data from Understanding Audiences for the Contemporary Arts (UACA) project. We uncover the influence of access and availability, co-attendance, and personal preference for early and late booking, demonstrating the value of co-analysis of independent datasets for revealing new insights into audience behaviour
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