Customer Personas on a Grand Scale

I’ve been reading this book lately titled "The New Rules of Marketing & PR" by David Meerman Scott. A marketing Guru friend of mine, Kathy Greenler Sexton, turned me onto this guy’s web site, and his web site is what inspired me to start doing this blog. It’s called Web Ink Now and is at http://www.webinknow.com/

 I am sorely tempted to just sit here and paraphrase elements from his book, there is so much good stuff in it. Suffice to say, he constantly points out that people are doing marketing things in the same old way, like the Internet doesn’t exist, and he relentlessly discusses one of my favorite topics, which is audience/customer awareness.

One of the things he discusses, and this is not necessarily a brand-new idea, is the idea of customer personas. I have seen this same concept employed at software companies, where they actually take photographs from magazines and assign personalities to these imaginary people. By defining their customers more specifically, this leads businesspeople to think in terms of both product creation and marketing in terms of "what does this or that customer want."

As I so often do, I looked back on my professional music career and tried to find some evidence somewhere that the classical music industry does something like this. Sadly, I could not.

After reading this guy’s book I was actually very happy and relieved to discover that other industries are guilty of this sort of habitual narcissism is well. Instead of thinking about the customer’s point of view, many people skip around that and say, "We will just make a product that we like that is is so wonderful that everybody will want to buy it." And I think I can sum up the music industry’s attitude with this phrase: "if people don’t like our product, there must be something wrong with THEM."

This discussion could go on a lot of different directions, so perhaps I will follow up on this with tomorrow’s blog post, but for now I want to stay with the whole idea of customer personas. My question for the moment is, how does this apply to the artistic world? I mean, if you are a college, or maybe a cell phone manufacturer, you can sit down and list what features and services you’re selling and why people are buying them, as related to their immediate needs and circumstances. With an artistic endeavor, well that gets a little tougher. Or perhaps I should say, it gets a little broader.

Using my own "orchestra kid shows" as a self-serving example, I think the reason the shows have been selling so consistently well around the globe for the past 20 years is because of customer awareness. By that, I mean awareness of the end-user, i.e. the families who come to the show.

When I wrote these shows, I actually sat down with the customer personas in mind. I knew that I would have both at least one exhausted parent, and a range of kids from infant to 15. So the shows had to have entertainment elements that would work for that entire age group.

People sometimes ask me why I am not writing more of the shows. The answer is, "because it’s too [expletive deleted] hard to do."

Believe me, if I had an endowment or a trust fund , and I didn't have to actually make sales, I would write kid shows the same way everyone else does.

In the classical music industry, the whole idea of "audience awareness" and definition of "customer personas" is pretty much entirely left to individual conductors (so it is not surprising then, that the conductors make 10 to 20 times as much money, and they are out on the speaking circuit in droves, where as I am the only rank-and-file orchestra musician I know of doing speaking appearances). Perhaps there is no point in introducing this concept to your run-of-the-mill section viola player. But if we don’t, we guarantee that that person will never be able to break out of a very narrow professional performing path, of being dependent on someone else to actually go and make the sale.

Audience/customer awareness is key to innovation and nonconformity.  If one lacks that knowledge and awareness, there is no impetus to innovate, as your main priority is simply to do what is most comfortable and convenient to yourself. That fear of the audience, and closing one's eyes to their point of view, leads to doing things the same old way. In the music business, and in so many other businesses, the educational experience tends to promote self-consciousness and self-centeredness. And the more deeply entrenched this attitude becomes, the harder it is to reverse polarity and start thinking in terms of what one’s customer wants.

I see a tremendous opportunity here for anyone in the art business. End-user awareness, audience awareness, and to an even greater degree, just the cognizance and consciousness of what it is to be a human being, this is the number one job of the artist. This is fabulous "customer persona" data for the sales department to have. And it is a huge part of what we in the art business can share with those strange exotic people who earn money for a living. 

PS a little bit of news just in, the Helena MT Symphony will be performing my "Phantom of the Orchestra" in spring of 2009.

© Justin Locke

www.justinlocke.com