Arts Marketing Performance: An Artistic-Mission-Led Approach to Evaluation

Abstract

Marketing in the arts sector has evolved during the past decades from a functional tool to a business philosophy. At the same time, a relational view of art as experience has emerged in contemporary arts philosophy, highlighting the role of arts consumers in the creation and reception of arts. As a consequence, arts consumers have gained a central position within the artistic mission of arts organizations, posing new challenges to the role of arts marketing both as a practice and as an academic discipline. Against this background, financial figures and audience numbers are insufficient indicators of the contribution that arts marketing makes to the functioning of arts organizations. This article suggests evaluating the performance of arts marketing based on the contribution made to the achievement of the arts organization's artistic mission and proposes a model based on Kaplan and Norton's Balanced Scorecard to guide the artistic-mission-led evaluation of arts marketing performance. By paying attention to the new strategic role of arts marketing within the emerging relational view of the arts and by integrating recent literature on performance management in nonprofit organizations, we make a theoretical contribution to the body of knowledge on arts marketing performance evaluation.

KEYWORDS:

• artistic experience
• artistic value
• Balanced Scorecard
• performance indicators
• performance management

Notes

1. There are a number of other publications on the measurement of the performance of cultural organizations, for instance Gilhespy (1999, 2001) and Towse (2001), but these studies are not focused specifically on the effectiveness of arts marketing.

2. Measuring client satisfaction is not new. Arts marketing scholars like Kotler and Sheff (1997) and Kotler and Kotler (1998) also consider client satisfaction a suitable control measure, but only when based on the assumption of a clear cause-and-effect relationship between client satisfaction and long-term revenues.

3. See also Van Maanen (1998a) who proposes a model with which the functioning of a theater system can be studied. He makes a distinction between (1) the production domain, (2) the consumption domain, and (3) the domain of dissemination into mental or ideological systems. A refined version of this model can be found in Van Maanen (2001).

4. In Boorsma (1998) a similar concept is used to discuss the notion of total artistic quality based upon the “magic triangle” developed by Staudt and Hinterwäller (1982) in order to analyze the total quality of products in general. We prefer the term “strategic triangle.”

5. For the role of incidental and nonspecialist arts customers see Boorsma (2002).

6. Performance reports have the following structure: (1) objective (derived from mission and strategy), (2) performance measures, (3) targets, and (4) initiatives (Kaplan 2001, 355; Kaplan and Norton 2001, 91).

7. Atkinson, Waterhouse, and Wells (1997) argue that the undervalued position of stakeholders is a general shortcoming of the Balanced Scorecard model and claim that for-profits also should monitor their relations with stakeholders.

8. The alternative is to add a fifth category, called, for example, external cooperation.

9. Audience education could be the task of a specialized education department. In that case, the marketing and education departments would have to work closely together and would both be responsible for building and maintaining audience relationships.