Audiences in Arts, Culture and Heritage: Solutions to our Problems

From James McQuaid at The Guardian:

At this year’s Arts Marketing Association conference, the National Arts Strategies president, Russell Willis Taylor, made some thought-provoking points through a case study on Ikea from which she believed arts and culture can learn. One of these was about knowing your value proposition: what are you uniquely placed to offer and how can this exude through an organisation? Willis Taylor encouraged us to be opportunistic, to build in space, energy and money in order to learn, keep our eyes open and be flexible and responsive. Her example to illustrate this in Ikea was the employee who started screwing off table legs to get the furniture into customers’ cars, which led to a revolution in the brand’s production and the flatpack we all know and (mostly) love today.

However, it was the points she made about how we think about audiences and customers that resonate most. Russell believes that we need to position audiences within our organisations as partners and consider very carefully the nature of our relationship with them. This, she said, should be clearly set out in a mission statement.

Read the full article.