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The Road to Recovery: Are shows too expensive or too woke?
Big Ideas:
- Art is meant to teach us how to deal with complicated topics.
- Inflation is a challenge in a lot of places.
- Think about your positioning.
Just so y’all wouldn’t think I forgot about London or the theatre, I found this article about woke vs. broke and it got me thinking.
I’m not shy about looking at the nature of our politics and seeing that most of the political arguments are great ways to avoid the root causes of challenges or the long-term issues that plague us.
That’s one of the great things that art does for us, it helps explain the world we live in.
Think about things like:
- To Kill a Mockingbird and how it explained racism and prejudice.
- Did you realize Star Wars was anti-authoritarianism?
- Or, how “Born in the USA” was an anti-war song?
Art is a way for us to explain the world or make sense of the world around us. So the woke idea may be real, but that is also the point of a lot of art.
The two more important points is the idea that people think that theatre is only for the wealthy.
That’s a positioning problem.
One that would require research, segmentation, and targeting.
Your position is how you show up in the market and the idea or words you want to have associated with your brand.
In this case, if the theatre wants inclusive to be one of the brand associations, there will need to be some serious work done to ensure that this is an idea that is consistently delivered upon through pricing, messaging, and casting…among other things.
This brings us to the final point and, maybe, the biggest issue right now: pricing and inflation.
I did a quick look at inflation numbers for a presentation and found that in the US, inflation is above 8%. In the UK, the number is just over 7.5%. This is causing people to rethink their purchases. In other markets, inflation is an issue as well.
For all of us, that means it is something we have to recognize and adjust our strategies to cope with.
In action:
- Have you positioned the way you want to be in the market? This means, are you showing up the way you want to?
- Are you reaching the audiences you want to reach? Maybe your message isn’t getting through because you aren’t talking in the right way to the right folks.
- Look at inflation and pricing, are you core customers or your targeted customers able to afford your shows and offerings right now?