David Lefkowitz, “Tangle #2” from his show “Tangle” at Thomas Barry Fine Arts. Image via mnartists
You wouldn’t be doing your job if you didn’t already know the demographic peaks or historical troughs in your audience profile. But predicting next year’s audience depends on knowing not just who comes, but also why.
Let’s say you have noticed an overall decline in audience numbers and an increase in the proportion of audience members over 50 years old. That’s mildly useful information but there are several possible reasons for this audience profile.
Maybe you appeal to middle-aged audiences and you ought to be orienting your program around this age group. But maybe your current appeal is just to the baby-boomers who grew up on counter culture and you should be thinking about the formative experiences of Gen X and what they will want in middle age. Or maybe your declining younger audience is a result of a fashion for an alternative entertainment and you need to align your offering with a 21st Century buzz.
If the age effect is the primary factor in your audience profile, then you can target new audiences as people reach your demographic slot. But if you are just appealing to these 50-somethings because of their historical experience (the cohort effect), you can’t expect today’s 40-somethings will follow suit. And to meet the demands of the Zeitgeist (the period effect), you need to address the issues of the day rather than focus on demographics.This complex equation is what Dutch cultural researcher Andries van den Broek calls the ‘three faces of time’ affecting arts participation. In an article published last year in the journal Cultural Trends, van den Broek analysed the effect of the three different dynamics on arts participation in the US. He found analysing age, cohort and period gives quite different results.
The age effect
The age effect works in favour of older people, who have both the time and money for arts participation but it also gives audiences peaks and troughs along a more complex longitudinal profile of life stages.
Young people in the life stage before responsibilities kick in also provide a significant demographic. Typically, those in early adulthood have more time though less money than people ten years their senior. They did 50 years ago and they do now. It’s not a function of how they were raised or of the particularly socio-economic conditions of 2015 but of their life stage. Similarly, people in their 30s are preoccupied with child-raising, the middle-aged experience a renewal of leisure time and the elderly find it harder to get around.
If age were the only parameter, arts organisation could trace their audiences along a demographic line that is high in childhood, strong in early adulthood, declining with the responsibilities of parenthood and peak working years then rising sharply in the empty-nester years, until the expect a steady stream of new audiences as a new group reaches middle age.
If your youth ticket-holders fail to translate into 30-something subscribers and you are able to identify the cause as life stage, you can address the issue directly. You might keep parents of young children connected with a production for young people or set up a campaign for reconnecting with parents of teens as they reach the stage of renewed freedom.
Hours, price points and packages may alter to keep people who have reached a new life stage engaged or you might accept the loss of slabs of your former audience with the comfort that a new cohort is coming through in your target age group.
The period effectCulture has its fashions and a burst of success may be a function of the appeal you offer at a particular time. If those 30-somethings stop coming, it might not be because of their life stage but because of the circumstances of the period: the technological alternatives, economic conditions or social fashions.
Depressed economic conditions can reduce ticket sales or prompt a taste for comedy and frothy musicals as audiences seek an escape from difficult times; new technology provides alternative entertainment; changed work or housing patterns affect accessibility and the issues of the day add appeal to certain subject matter.
In the current period, the growth of leisure alternatives, home entertainment and the online world is having a direct effect on arts participation that is particular to the challenges of the time, rather than to any demographic profile.
For many arts organisations, the speed of social change works against the need to produce considered work and program it well in advance. In his first season with the Melbourne Theatre Company in 2013, Artistic Director Brett Sheehy tried an experiment of leaving one work unprogrammed as a ‘Zeitgeist’ production, it could slip into the program. Many subscribers were willing to take the risk but the pressure to produce something that fitted the bill did not produce a wholly successful result and the technique has not been repeated.
The cohort effect
While the period effect looks at today’s influences, the cohort effect focuses on the formative experiences a section of your audience had in their youth and the effect those experiences have on their cultural choices today.
Today’s empty nester has had very different experiences from the empty nester of 20 years ago. She is a baby-boomer who grew up in the 60s and rode the 70s wave of feminism, mobbed the Beatles or swooned for Mick Jagger and likely decorated her first home with macramé and home-made pottery. So it follows that her cultural choices as an older adult will be influenced as much by her cohort as by her current age.
Cohort combines age with historical period to produce a taste segment that works only for that cohort. It goes a long way to explaining why an ageing population does not necessarily translate into increased audiences for an arts organisation that has strong older audiences today. For classical music, for example, a key challenge is whether baby boomers will develop a taste for classical music as they age or remain a cohort more committed to rock and roll.
Younger cohorts tend to be better educated than older and high levels of education correlate with higher levels of arts participation.
Programming to cohort allows your audience to age with you – but it risks a narrow demographic that drops off a cliff quickly without a periodic major overhaul.
How they interact
Unscrambling the complex effects of age, cohort and period for your audience is difficult because the three factors interact. By definition, today’s 50-year old is also from the cohort born in 1965. Similarly, the interaction between age 50 and the period 2015 only applies to this cohort this year so it’s hard to know whether it’s a function of the period or the cohort.
But just conducting one analysis – as many arts organisations have traditionally done – could give you a very distorted view of your audience.
Van den Broek’s research on American arts participation gives clues about how the three factors interact. He found older people were more likely to participate in arts activity than younger people. But younger cohorts were more likely to participate than older cohorts (probably because they are better educated). That would be good news for the arts, except that he found arts participation is declining over all – probably not because interest in the arts but rather because of increased competition – a function of the current historical period with its explosion of leisure choices.
So the age measure suggests you can expect increasingly older audiences, the cohort measure suggests you can expect increasingly younger audiences and the period measure suggests you can expect declining audiences. We said it was a complex equation.
No single piece of research or analysis will provide all the answers. But audience development requires an understanding that age, period and cohort interact to change audience cultural choices constantly. Expect change and never blame or credit a single factor for changes in your audience.
