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Market intelligence for the region
Market Intelligence is an essential building block of all audience development and marketing planning. The following services provide a rich mix of analysis and interpretation both general to the region and specific to an organisation.
Arts Council England, Area Profile Reports
These reports enable users to define a catchment area, and describe its population. Catchment Areas may be defined by administrative geography (e.g. county/unitary authority boundary), drivetime or postal sector geography (which can be tailored to match an organisation’s own catchment area). Area Profile Reports have a similar application in arts planning, resource allocation and marketing. They provide for the whole defined area, and each of the postal sectors in it, comprehensive demographic and other information and an estimate of the number of potential arts and museum attenders.
When used with box office data on the numbers of ticket buyers for a particular venue, they can identify opportunities for developing sales. The overview report for the region is attached to give you a sense of what information is included. Arts Council Area Profile report
amh, Audiences Yorkshire and Arts About Manchester are the three English audience development agencies currently licensed by Arts Council England to produce Area Profile Reports using CACI’s InSite GIS software. Area Profile Reports are available to not-for profit organisations operating in the arts and cultural sector or to venues receiving work from funded clients of Arts Council England or the Scottish Arts Council or Arts Council Wales. Museums registered with the Museums, Libraries and Archives Council are also entitled to receive Area Profile Reports.
A summary of their purpose and process is attached, written by Peter Verwey, who first brought market intelligence to the arts sector and is still trying to help us to use it intelligently and with sophistication.
Download the summary as a PDF document
Download the summary in Word Format
If you want further information or assistance in deciding the relevance of these reports to your work, please contact leo.sharrock@hants.gov.uk
Database Mapping
Visual images of the geographical distribution of your customers are produced by mapping your box office or mailing list data. This provides a good starting to begin understanding where your market currently exists. It may also be valuable to compare the distribution of different segments of your database representing, for example, different programme strands or event types.
Catchment Area Mapping
Your organisation’s ‘catchment area’ is defined and mapped by establishing which postal sectors contain the core of your database, or for non-ticketed organisations, by defining a catchment area by ‘drivetime’ distance from the organisation. This can help you understand the strengths and weaknesses of particular segments of your current and potential audiences.
Population Potential and Penetration Mapping
The penetration of your attenders into the population of certain postal sectors can be measured to assess the potential for further development. This process can also include information from the Target Group Index (TGI) survey to measure the potential for the development of attenders to particular artform categories and to museums, stately homes and architectural sites. As well as demographic information (such as age and ethnicity) the TGI produced figures for each postal sector, indicating the potential for attendance to categories such as ‘Plays’, ‘Opera’ or ‘Art Galleries’. This information can be tailored to your catchment area and produced as a map or a table.
Distance Location Degradation Analysis
TGI potential figures estimate the number of artform attenders in an area, but can only take into account general attendance bahaviour, not necessarily relative to the specific location of a particular organisation. Although ‘drivetime’ attempts to take this into account, it is not perfect.
amh have therefore devised a new mapping technique that attempts to reflect current potential attendance to a defined organisation, based upon existing marketing activity. By examining the effect of increasing distance from the organisation on the numbers of current attenders and applying this relationship to TGI data, a more realistic potential is provided for attendance which recognises geographical and community barriers.
Other Mapping Requirements
Our mapping capacity is not limited to database and catchment area mapping. For example we can map the provision of resources, distribution of income or ticket quantities, frequency of attendance or the location of specified facilities.
Database Profiling: ACORN & MOSAIC
Profiling is a way to segment and describe the population. We can profile attenders of organisations/events in order to learn more about the people who attend and to try to find more people like them.
Profiling can be done in many different ways, and socio-geodemographic profiling tools like ACORN and MOSAIC work by clustering groups of people together, dependent on where they live and what kinds of consumer and lifestyle behaviours they have in common. The systems then describe these commonalities in order help us to learn more about the clusters.
This ‘stereotyping’ may seem artificial. “I don’t shop at the same place as my neighbour!” or “we don’t read the same newspaper”, but people living in similar types of accomodation and areas, often with necessarily similar incomes and jobs are bound to share many lifestyle characteristics.
Both ACORN & MOSAIC enable an attender database to be segmented into a set of headline clusters or ‘Groups’, which then further sub-divide into a larger number of ‘Types’ in order to give a greater depth of detail.
The ‘Groups’ and ‘Types’ are descriptively named, giving an indication of the lifestyle characteristics which define them. Examples include, “Affluent Blue Collar”, “Golden Empty Nesters” and “Dinky Developments”. The ACORN & MOSAIC profiles detail the proportions of each of these groups on your database and also their respective proportions in relation to the population of your catchment area.
Once we know ‘who’ is on the database we can identify others in the catchment area who potentially share similar interests, or we can look to see who isn’t currently attending and could be. We can then begin to identify informed and targeted marketing campaigns to develop potential new audiences.
The ACORN and MOSAIC Handbooks which accompany the profiles can help in targeting marketing activities and communications to specific lifestyle groups. They contain a wealth of information about the characteristics and consumer behaviour of each of the ‘Groups’ and ‘Types’. Such information includes newspaper readership, television and radio consumption habits, predisposition towards certain leisure activities and even whether or not a particular group is more likely to respond to ‘discount’ promotions or ‘value-added’ initiatives. We can then draw on this information to target the right people, with the right message at the right time.
Prospect Locating
Both ACORN and MOSAIC are linked to prospect locating facilities that provide for the purchase of name and address data for direct marketing. The names and addresses can be defined based on MOSAIC or ACORN profiles. Selections can be further refined by filtering prospects based on geography (eg. by postal sector) and demographics (such as age, gender, or estimated household income).
Developing Attender Databases for Non-Ticketed Organisations
amh and Audiences Central have also been working with art galleries and museums in order to develop methods and best practice for non-ticketed organisations to capture data, even those with limited IT capacities. Such databases can enable access to the type of mapping and profiling services indicated above, as well as providing marketing, mailing and email lists.
For further details, contact either agency (see links page)
Arts Index South East
Arts Index South East aims to develop knowledge about arts attenders in the South East of England.
You can access the AISE website from the ADSE home page.
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