Why Market Research Matters

Recently I’ve been doing market research for GigsList.org and CodedHistory.com, which has been eye opening.  I thought to share with you some of the results.

I know a few Boomers who’ve worked their way up to arts management or have their own entertainment and media companies and are now scratching their heads about today’s audiences. The confusion is not only for arts and media productions, but also for recruiting.   It is a very serious subject. I’ve personally seen friends’ companies and non profits dive, due to not keeping up with what current audiences and crew and talent want or how they look for it.

If your audience is established and you have a good thing going in Australia there is a saying, “When you are on a good thing stick to it”.   Promoting arts and entertainment to a long term established audience is a different formula, developed over time and specific to each production.

Before the Internet and social media, promoting anything was fairly basic. Place a few ads in local newspapers and magazines, stick up some great posters around the neighborhood, send out a few press releases, chat with folks in local bars and hand out as many flyers as you can afford and a limited umber of freebies. Mailing lists were only for who could afford the printing and postage.  When the Internet and social media did come promoters and producers, and their backers and talent and sponsors, loved the free promo and made bank for the first decade.  Then something happened they couldn’t quite put their fingers on, something they didn’t know to factored in.

What they didn’t know to factor in was every geek learning coded and starting heaps of social media platforms all vying for your obsessions and may the latest trend win. That plus spam drowning out mailing list performance.  Plus increase in populations and different forms of arts and entertainment in the digital world creating a massive uptick in competition.  I mean who knew?

Back to now in 2019 and watching projects crash and burn over 3 decades and several current projects on my own plate, including gigslist.info. I had to find out what people like now who are the ages when I was working in the field.  With the new Gigslist.info software I’ve been able to run analytics the last few months. I found that the majority of viewers access by mobile devices.  This brought me to my current audience keyword search. 

My current audience keyword search is MiLlennials, as explained by Wikipedia…

“Millennials, also known as Generation Y or Gen Y, are the demographic cohort following Generation X and preceding Generation Z.Researchers and popular media typically use the early 1980s as starting birth years and the mid-1990s to early 2000s as ending birth years.”

Researching trends for millennials in what kind of marketing and work environment makes them wet between the legs was very much irony as well as eye opening.   Millennials happen to like and aspire to everything that their more forward thinking parents and Boomer Gen promoters, crusaders, and poets told them to like and aspire to. 

So why have Boomers forgotten what they taught their kids and young audiences?  This I think is a good question to answer first and as a Boomer I can say what I felt and observed.   The basic nutshell answer is that Boomers and older didn’t do any market research, so had no idea what trends were going to hit and miss where it hurts.    But this was not all faults cause by the Boomer promoters and producers.  

Popular promoters, producers, and artists tend to have a lot of people getting in their faces, mostly with personal or business agendas, sometimes both personal and business.  One story from the grapevine (no names of course) is of a popular big party promoter working SF and LA.  Met a lover who eventually became a spouse who took every good looking person that the promoter liked to look at, and party goers liked to look at and follow on social media, off the mailing lists and blocked on FB.    The next big party the promoter and new spouse produced together lost nearly $40K.

After the promoter’s new spouse made some other business changes, they also lost a regular contract producing a VIP lounge within a huge yearly, and very trending, festival.  This was the promoter’s established audience, which was the income that paid the rent and kept the lights on.  A formula and avid fan club that had been developed over 20 years. 

The spouse erased 30 years audience development and business relationships with just a few clicks and a total lack of knowledge about the business and its audience and lack of market research.  Now they are up in the woods somewhere and the spouse’s parents are helping with the mortgage that the promoter and spouse can’t afford.   Lust and ego are not advisable platforms to make business decisions from. I’ve been in similar situations myself, it happens more often than not.

If somebody on your team doesn’t understand your audience who pay you to do what you do, they can’t help with marketing your product or making business decisions.  They may be useful in another department, such as production, handing out flyers, or the backroom of admin, but business decisions no no no!  In audience development the thing you are researching is finding and getting in front of the people who pay you to do what you do. That plus making sure what you have something they want.   In today’s market it is who is paying the money you want to satisfy, not who you think should be paying. 

Today’s market that’s paying the money in 2019 are Millennials and they don’t pay much if anything. Unless it is something that all their friends want then they will totally empty their pockets and credit card limits.  You Boomers programmed them like that by repeatedly bashing their brains with concepts such as community, collaboration, innovation, truth, socialization, globalism, free market, humanitarianism, open source, and live for the now.  

All the stuff you Boomers idealized, but got cynical about when you realized how big the job really is to do that. So you put it in the back of your “someday when I’m a gazillionaire” cupboard and with the distractions of life you then forgot about it. But your kids didn’t forget, they soaked it up like Mother’s milk and grew up to make it their lifestyle. 

Because you seem to have forgotten what you programmed into your next generation I will lay it out point by pointing a nutshell to remind you:

Community

Today’s audiences want to be part of a club that interacts on multiple levels. Live events, social media, discussion groups, social meet ups, after parties.   They have watch Boomer have all they fun on the internet, now they want a piece of it.

Collaboration

Today’s audiences are not into the boss and employer concept. They see everybody as an equal contributor to a project.  They’ve been taught, since kindergarten, that it takes a team to get something done.  

Innovation

“Technology and Innovation” the catchphrase of the late 20th and early 21st centuries drummed into every kid’s senses and almost every television and internet ad and school curriculum.  Then we wonder why kids throw tantrums when we take away their mobile devises. (FYI: 3 or 4 weeks in the rural countryside with no form of internet or media or digital devices of any kind, and with only other kids to play with, cures them. Some parents I know, friends of the family, have done it successfully in Australia in 2018;-)

Truth

Another popular catchphrase of the later Boomer Gen was “Truth in Advertising”.   For Millennials any kind of information is advertising and requires truth. This includes news, movies, and documentaries.  Anybody with an internet connection can “Google It” and call a teacher, or journalist or historian, out at any time. Hence the anti “Fake News” collective war cry.  

Socialization

Socialization is related to Community, but on a slightly bigger scale, a kind of conduit between Community and Globalization. When multiple local and nearby groups mix and collaborate. 

Globalism

“noun-  the attitude or policy of placing the interests of the entire world above those of individual nations.”  Dictionary.com  You’ve heard it said “Be careful what you wish for” But did you know there is another half to that saying?  The whole saying is “Be careful what you wish for, because you might just get it.” Globalism by definition is all people equal with equal benefits and access to medical, technology, housing etc.    The problem with that, as Boomers are now experiencing, is there is no more budget left to help local citizens when they retire or get ill or lose their homes. And it will be worse for Millennials when they start feeling their bones.  But the word ‘Globalism’ does look attractive in a promo.

 Free Market

Same as Globalism, but concerns businesses, as in too much competition to survive. Even Facebook can’t stay on top forever. But the word “Free” is always a great marketing and search keyword for any audience.  

Humanitarianism (AKA Social Conscious)

See Globalism. While being politically correct and sharing excess with those in need is correct, giving everything away until there is nothing left for you or your family or community is just plain idiocy.  You Boomers drummed “Humanitarianism” into Millennial heads without the caveat of there needing to be checks and balances. But the word “Humanitarianism” looks better in a promo if we leave out the caveat. 

 Live In The Now

Boomer kids and their parents and grandparents lived under the threat of war. Nuclear War, the Vietnam war, Palestine and more. From the 1960’s to the mid 1990’s creative type Boomers that could afford to, traveled the world, joined religious cults, lived in communal housing, partied all night, and put off having kids. Their ideology rejects the 9 to 5 with a mortgage paradigm, because they thought  they would be nuked at any time.   

By the late 1990’s Boomers realized they weren’t going to get nuked, so got 9 to 5 jobs and mortgages and told their kids of their aspirations and adventures and their kids listened.  By the time their kids were teens they wanted to live the adventures of “Living in the Now” like their parents, and settle down later. The problem is that today the settling down later is not a good idea for long term financial security.  But ‘Live In The Now’ looks good in a promo.

As observed some of these key words are double edged swords and fake truths. They look good in a promo, but the reality is not so much.  We Boomers might need to get a grip on the reality we created, starting with acknowledging “Houston we have a problem”. Then study that problem point by point to find where and how we royally fucked up.  AKA Market research to remember what we programmed our future generations to want. 

There is a good reason why monarchies have lasted longer than voted in governments. Forget the Hollywood versions, fake history and fake news. The reality is to do with the fact that royal children and their children and children’s children are raised around politics and how it affects a population. They get to see up close and personal how government policy develops and succeeds and crashes and burns.  Centuries of data.

A monarch doesn’t actually do the ruling of a country. A monarch has advisors who mentor the ministers and senators who make the laws.  A monarch helps with sharing the ages of wisdom from their family’s collective observations.  The fuck ups are from the ministers and advisors. This is market research, knowing and remembering the life experience of what will and won’t work for an audience and taking that analytic data into account.  

Who is your audience and what is it they want and will like and will tell their friends about in a good way?  There is a different answer to this question for every project.  Some Millennials I know love country music and hip hop and don’t do anything without sharing it with their iPhones.  Other millennials like Reggae and the Grateful Dead and are not so glued to technology.  Some millennials are college grads working for startups and like EDM and wearable technology. 

It is up to you to research what audiences will buy is what you are selling, or if not how to adjust your product and marketing so they will buy it.  It is a science of promoting and recruiting for anything.  You can’t learn it in a school, because the data changes year to year and month to month.  Use your web site’s SEO analytics and web searches for up to date data.

An old saying I learned in a touring circus “You can fool all of the people some of the time and some of the people all of the time, but you can’t fool all of the people all of the time.”  The moral of the phrase is don’t believe your own bullshit.   

Markets such as Millennials and near future generations do not go on faith alone, they are better informed and when in doubt they research it, including researching your show to buy tickets for or your organization to work with.  In market research it is your job to find and fill their wish list boxes with positive ticks. 

Peace Out

Deborah

GigsList.info