by our anonymous correspondent
It’s not often you find more arts marketers than cricketers on the outfield of a first-class cricket ground on the first day of the season but these are unusual times for more cricket and arts marketing and anyone who wants to work in either field should be cherished accordingly.
What motivates people to attend these affairs? The prospect of tea and biscuits with Francois Matarasso? The opportunity to closely observe Gloucestershire County Cricket Club’s official team photograph? A sequence of opportunity to meet face-to-face with people you’ve only ever spoken to on the phone when you’ve wanted something?
Personally speaking I had two motivations. Firstly, to acquire crude knowledge that might enable me to exploit the patience and goodwill of emerging and existing audiences further than strictly necessary. And secondly, because when I die I want it to be in a room full of people who are worried about churn analysis.
Of course, conferences such as this are not just about audience development. They are also about that cornerstone of marketing consultancy: jargon development. With segmentational cluster analysis, psychographic profiling and second-level interrogation now happily installed in the lexicon of every arts marketer, the way is open for startling new contributions to the genre.
My personal favourite from this year’s gathering were ‘chunking up’ and ‘chunking down’ and ‘perceptual mapping axes’ none of which I could currently explain to a taxi driver/small child/fellow arts marketer, but all of which I’m sure will be smoothly incorporated into my daily speech pattern within a matter of months.
As one of my college lecturers once said to me: “Everything that is relevant to human behaviour can be qualified and quantified in terms of psychoepistemelogical anthropocentricism…” Which was fine but I think my question to him had been “Do you mind if I go to the toilet?”
Nice to play those classic branding games in the Sarah Gee/Shirley Kirk workshop. You know “if you were a drink, what sort of drink would you be?” or “how would you sum up your organisation in two words?”
Perhaps, to finish, a new game on similar lines: “If the SWAM conference was a jukebox, which tune would it be playing?”
The director of SWAM makes unspecified promises of ‘free beer’ with regard to the most amusing or legally interesting response.
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