Big Ideas:
- Broadway has re-opened, but recovery is still a ways off.
- Like all businesses now, Broadway needs to follow the three steps of brand strategy: Diagnosis, Strategy, and Execution.
- Broadening the market is a wise decision
First of all, I’m glad to see Broadway back. I owe a lot to Broadway and I’ve got a list of shows that I want to get to the City to see in the next few months to do my part to make sure the City bounces back.
Second, remember the maxim that “re-opening isn’t recovery”. That’s what Broadway is dealing with right now, the reality that re-opening isn’t enough.
The Tonys are a pretty good advertisement for Broadway and in most years, a soft sell event.
This year, the pleading to see “any show” ran into the reality that 2/3 of tickets are bought by tourists and tourism isn’t coming back yet.
Combine that with the rightful calls that Broadway does a better job reflecting the world around it and you had a Tony Awards show that was unlike any we’ve seen before.
In thinking through the idea of recovery, looking at what is happening in markets around the world, and helping a few clients rebuild their strategies, it seems like the right time to point out the basics of brand strategy because that will help Broadway and most organizations right now.
The three core sections at the heart of your brand strategy are:
- Diagnosis
- Strategy
- Execution
Let me walk you through each of them quickly.
First, diagnosis.
Remember my advice, the first step in any brand activity is a step back to get a lay of the land.
You are going to want to begin with the research of the market and the world around you. As all of these shows open up on Broadway, the first thing I would have looked at was the number of tickets that were bought traditionally by tourists.
Because knowing that tourism is still on the outs, I would have known that I likely needed to redraw my map.
That’s true no matter what the project, but in this case…it is almost too obvious.
The second part of diagnosis, segmentation.
You need to draw a map of the market based on the world around you right now.
Like I read in the paper last week, the city that has been hit the hardest from a population standpoint has been DC. That means that the map the teams and venues were working off of in DC needs to be redrawn to meet the demands of the after-times.
The same with Broadway.
The City is coming back, but the tourists haven’t yet.
After you diagnose, then comes your strategy.
What are the key points to strategy?
You begin with targeting the market you want to hit.
You can’t try to hit everyone, you don’t have the budget most likely and if you target everyone with the same message, you are just throwing away money anyway.
Then you position your brand in the market.
For or against.
About you or against the competition.
On Broadway, you can do either. But don’t try to do both at the same time.
Finally, you pick some goals and objectives to help guide your tactical decisions.
The final step is execution.
That’s tactics.
In marketing, the 4 Ps:
- Product
- Price
- Place
- Promotion
Each of these pieces matters and they are executed through your strategic decisions. As an example, look at “Slave’s Play” and their 10,000 seats at $39. That could be a wise pricing decision to get an audience to try out a play that might be competing with other shows for local’s money and position it as a choice of being able to do both shows.
With the product, you can do all kinds of things with your ticket to expand the value like including a drink or a cast album download or something else.
Promotion, well if you’ve done your segmentation work, you’ll know there are tons of ways to promote a show that are unique to each segment.
The place is about distribution and in the case of the recovery of Broadway may open the door to a different discussion around distribution like what is the nature of the relationship between Broadway and the secondary market now?
As I’ve been prattling on about, none of this is easy so you need to get back to first principles.