Segmenting for arts marketing: the mistake of adopting useless criteria

Market segmentation is a familiar concept to arts marketers. However, it is commonly applied to identifying customer (visitor and audience) profiles based on the most simplistic and traditional demographic (e.g., age and gender) and behavioral (e.g., attendance) segmentation methods. Reduced government funding, ever-increasing consumer expenditures on arts and cultural (A&C) pursuits, emerging user-friendly/free technologies, all coalesce to present arts organizations with challenges, but also with opportunities to recruit, retain and grow a solid customer base. Many A&C decision-makers need to accept and understand that a culture of subsidy, dependence and market failure is long behind us, and in order to survive and grow, arts organization need to embrace a strategic customer-centric approach. With this comes data-driven decision-making and ultimately a better and deeper segmentation of markets that aid the creation and promotion of meaningful A&C products and repertoires. A more holistic approach to market segmentation can help provide sustainable solutions to many arts organizations that are not fortunate enough to get handsome handouts and subsidies. This chapter seeks to provoke, challenge and redefine potential A&C markets and to identify and share good practice so that sector-wide learning can take place.