Forest for the Trees

As a general rule, musicians tend to be suspicious of marketers, agents, and other PR types. It's not that we think we can do without their services, of course, but we're taught from the first time we pick up an instrument that the music we play is deeply meaningful stuff, and selling it to the public like its a case of beer or a football game seems somehow wrong to us. Throw in the fact that people who work in music and people who work in PR each tend to speak in a very specific insider language, and that they aren't the same languages, and the gap widens.

The best way of explaining it might be to say that musicians harbor a deep-seated fear that the people who market us would be happiest if we agreed to drop all the Mahler and Stravinsky and just play the 1812 Overture and an assortment of Beatles arrangements every week. And on the other side of the coin, the folks who dedicate their professional lives to making our performances seem like something the public should spend its money on are frequently exasperated and baffled by musicians' seeming disinterest in (or even outright opposition to) any effort to make what we do more accessible to the people buying the tickets.

All of which is to say, it's an uneasy partnership. Everyone's on the same side, really, but not always on the same page. And as a result, a lot of marketing techniques that the for-profit world of commerce takes for granted never really get tried when the product being pitched is an orchestra (or a theater or a museum, for that matter.) So I'm always on the lookout for the obvious sorts of ideas that those of us in my business frequently miss while we're too busy worrying about being taken seriously.

Here's one now - promoter/agent Amanda Ameer, blogging about just this sort of thing over at ArtsJournal, points out that retail marketing has become so sophisticated and subtle that just this week, she walked into a clothing store she had no need to go into, just because it was inviting (by design.) She then compares the techniques employed by the store to those employed by Carnegie Hall, just down the block, and concludes that Carnegie isn't even marketing in the same ballpark. Forget the stock posters that ring the building, says Ameer - why isn't there music playing from just inside wide-open doors, or a video display touting upcoming concerts? Why should the public take an interest in what you're selling if you don't seem terribly interested in offering it up?

This is the kind of thinking that led the Minnesota Orchestra a few years back to adorn the entire front and sides of Orchestra Hall with giant pictures of Osmo, the orchestra, and even a few audience members. At the time, it was supposed to be a one-year thing, just to get people talking and spruce up the look of our 30-plus-year-old facade. It worked - we got plenty of press coverage out of it (my favorite write-up was from local writer Christy DeSmith, then of The Rake, who described Osmo as sporting "a slightly dopey smile, as if he had just bumped his head,") and the "wrap," as we call it, leaves no doubt about what our building is, and what you'll find inside. There's no longer any thought of going back to the unwrapped look.

The music world is so wrapped up in itself (by necessity - doing what we do for a living requires a ridiculous level of single-minded devotion to purpose) that we frequently forget that the rest of the world doesn't spend a lot of time thinking about Beethoven symphonies and the new Grapes of Wrath opera. And when we do remember, we tend to look for ways to make the general public as obsessive about music as we are, rather than finding ways to draw in the casual listener, or even random people who have no idea that they might enjoy the concert hall experience. And that's a shame, because - as Ameer's blog post demonstrates - it's not that hard to make people want to walk in your front door.