London Dance Escalator

London Dance Escalator was a collaboration between The Place, the Southbank Centre Queen Elizabeth Hall and Sadler's Wells.  The dance programmers from each venue jointly commissioned Hofesh Shechter, an Associate at The Place, to choreograph a new piece of work, 'In Your Rooms', and present it at each of the three venues during 2007.

• 27-31 March 2007 The Place
• 4 & 5 May 2007 Southbank Centre, Queen Elizabeth Hall
• 28 & 29 September 2007 Sadler's Wells

This project's combined objectives were to support the artistic development of the choreographer Hofesh Shechter and to increase understanding of existing audiences across all venues and how they might influence others to attend the venues in the project.  The project therefore sought to go as far as it could to realising the following objectives:

• To understand the existing crossover and aficionado audiences and stimulate them to attend more than one of the venues in the project.
• To investigate how to stimulate crossover/aficionado attenders to be active as initiators to attract a wider audience to the project.
• To identify the tone, style and content of communications tools that would stimulate this relationship building.

 

Most of the marketing activity was undertaken by the venues individually, while the research covered all venues' audiences. By focusing on these objectives the overall aim was to discover how it might be possible to ‘strengthen' the contemporary dance audiences for London.

 

Outcomes

• The crossover audience between the venues was minimal based on a count of households who attended more than one venue (using Snapshot London data). Each venue therefore developed its own discrete market for the work.
• The segmentation developed as a result of this work divided attenders between: 
• those professionally involved with dance and those who were not, and
• those who are naturally initiators when it comes to cultural attendance and those who are more likely to be responders to recommendations.
• The professionals strongly influence each other, however they have less influence on the non-professionals. The non-professional initiators are the most likely to seek out information and respond to marketing messages and have the most influence on the large potential market of dance attenders who fall into the non-professional responders group.
• The non-professional initiators require clarity in terms of marketing messages. While they seek out information and attend a range of work, they are still not experts and need specific hooks to help with their decision making. This group provides recommendations to and distil messages for a much wider group of potential attenders, ie. the non-professional responders. 

 

Follow this link for details of the audience data analysis which informed this project.

We have also developed a range of resources relevant to audience development for dance companies available here.

For further details of this primary research please contact us.  This research and other work focusing on particular artforms is useful for helping to identify ways of growing audiences, particularly understanding how word of mouth might work and ways to engage less frequent attenders.