Category Archives: marketing

2022 update on Demographic Change and the Performing Arts

This short video on demographic change is as fresh and needed today as it was a decade ago when I created it. The questions I posed for the performing arts have only become all the more urgent in this ongoing COVID pandemic reality – and in may ways they still beg to be fully answered by the live arts – as well as other sectors, like health care, housing, social services, technology.

Also, it should be obvious that the labour shortages we see now across almost every sector aren’t merely a COVID effect but largely a demographic effect. The COVID part seems more specific in that people who need to work are working but they aren’t as willing to earn low wages, and want reasonable working conditions. In fact, labour market participation is up in younger age groups as COVID recovery has advanced.

Changing Demographics and the Performing Arts from CAPACOA on Vimeo.

Here are a couple of articles on how the aging population is playing out when we don;t make the plans needed even though we can see the train leave the station decades in advance.

https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/daily-quotidien/220427/dq220427a-eng.htm

https://www.cbc.ca/news/business/job-skills-shortage-1.6409237

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/ottawa/ottawa-workers-covid-retirements-1.6529325

Strategic Planning – Ten Strategies Framework in 2022

I have been using the Alpha Strategies framework advanced by Alan W. Kennedy and Thomas E. Kennedy, after taking a Strategy Certificate executive development courses with Alan at Schulich School of Business about a decade ago. It has been a great vessel to place assessment and planning tools like research-based SWOTs or Business Canvas tool into a broader strategic narrative. Kennedy’s eight Alpha Strategies framework has held up well and has been a useful tool in my practice. It covers eight areas to consider in its strategic management: 1) Business Definition, 2) Production/Service Delivery, 3) Infrastructure (Intellectual, real and digital properties), 4) Financial Management, 5) Marketing and Communications (Audiences and Channels), 6) Organization Management (People), 7) Growth, 8) Risk Management.

With the COVID discontinuities, a heightened focus on serious climate change impacts and major social movements and their mid- to far-right-wing backlash, I will be adding “environmental” and “social” impact strategies in my practice from here on. (Political considerations play in each of these 10 realms, so I am not adding political as a dimension of strategy.) It will be interesting to see where solutions will go from here for my clients. 

Ten Strategies for Strategic Planning 2022
Ten Strategies for Strategic Planning 2022 using Kennedy’s eight Alpha Strategies plus ESG

Imagine Yukon’s Awesome, Global Digital Presence

On November 20, 2020, 31 Yukoners gathered via Zoom to talk to each other about big ideas from the starting points of:

How can we build a true Yukon digital platform to put our collective foot forward to the vast online population?

Chart showing the evolution of Yukon from a place to a global brand to a future global digital brand

What would Yukoners and Yukon businesses have to build together to achieve such an awesome, global online presence? What kinds of content would we need to have, what kinds of digital technologies would we use to create awesome digital experiences, and what kind of visionary web presence would we create to be a global online force?

Here is the full zoom recording with annotated chapter markers as well as a written summary report:

Several Yukon-led territorial and national projects were featured as part of the exchange of ideas and experiences:

  1. https://yfnarts.ca/ – online store for Yukon Indigenous arts and products (Charlene Alexander, YFNCTA)
  2. https://yukononlinemarket.ca/ – just launched online store for artisans and crafters (Jasmine Roush, Willow Gamberg, Yukon)
  3. https://availablelight.watch/ – launched in October 2019, ALD makes Yukon films and shorts available to Yukoners and the world for viewing and renting (Braden Brickner, Yukon)
  4. https://digitalartsnation.ca/ – national digital literacy and intelligence project (Inga Petri, Yukon)
  5. http://digitalinnovationcouncil.ca/ – conversations, insights from digital practitioners in the arts and culture sector (Inga Petri, Yukon)
  6. https://yukonorganics.ca/ – sharing food orders to get high quality foods into remote locations at good prices (Scott McKenzie, Yukon)
  7. Creative Lab North (Melaina Sheldon & Jayden Soroka, Yukon) – in development
  8. ThePitch.ca: Online Showcase for the Performing Arts (Debbie Peters, Yukon) – in development
  9. Yukon Transportation Museum – developing digital products and services (Janna Swales, Yukon) – in development

Guest speakers also contributed greatly to the conversation by expanding on approaches to digital technologies and opportunities: Tammy Lee, Culture Creates (Montreal), Margaret Lam, Bemused Network (Waterloo, ON)

For more on Inga’s digital vision take a listen to Yukon Entrepreneur Podcast Series recorded as part of Yukon Innovation Week 2020.

Yukon Innovation Week 2020 November

DigitalArtsNation.ca launched!

Today, we’ve launched digitalartsnation.ca, the website for Making Tomorrow Better: Taking Digital Action in the Performing Arts. This initiative received significant funding from the Canada Council for the Arts’ Digital Strategy Fund in spring of 2019. The nation-wide partnership led by the Atlantic Presenters Association includes the Manitoba Arts Network, BC Touring Council, Island Mountain Arts/Northern Exposure, Yukon Arts Centre / N3 and the Yellowknife Arts & Cultural Centre.

logo Making Tomorrow Better Taking Digital  Action in the Performing Arts

Of note: most of the participants in the face-to-face workshops live on the edges of the country. therefore we tailor content to suit the realities, including slower internet connectivity,  of rural and remote communities across Canada. Because what works there, will work in urban centres, too.

This national initiative brings practical digital know-how to participants across Canada, through custom workshops, online how-to tutorials and information-sharing

These workshops are designed to help participants speak digital with confidence – that is, we will demystify and discuss the digital realm in plain English – and quickly become competent participants in arts sector conversations about leading digital tools, emerging digital innovations, and new digital business models.

Workshops are led by Inga Petri, Strategic Moves, or Tammy Lee, Culture Creates.

Watch our upcoming workshops page and see where we are headed next!

Why simplicity is key to marketing success

As our world and technology have become increasingly complex, people gravitate toward simple, easily recognizable messages and calls-for-action.

Let’s agree: The time of complex visual messaging in marketing and advertising is over. Collages are dead.

A simple image that conveys a single core idea are favoured by marketers and brand managers because they work. In essence, today anything that is not necessary to get to “yes” merely gets in the way. 

It is the difference between the completely uncluttered Google search website with its legendary a single function, and Yahoo search where myriad content has come to obscure its (former) main function. 

The challenge is that arriving at simplicity is hard work. It requires a focused purpose and a great deal of clarity. It requires knowing who exactly your message needs to speak to and convince to pay attention and a deep understanding of what breakthrough communications are about, what they must over come. 

Our brains are designed to edit out information, to ignore clutter, to disregard anything that doesn’t look immediately pertinent. 

Great marketing gets past those hardwired gatekeepers. And great marketing has to be singular, direct and address an important target market motivation. 

Hallmarks of effective communications

  1. Purpose
  2. Specific target audience
  3. Relevance to audience
  4. Clarity
  5. Consistency
  6. Suitable medium
  7. Repetition
  8. Multi-channel
  9. Conversation
  10. Evaluate and Learn

Components of effective messaging

  • Message (what you want to say)
  • Redundancy (used to emphasize the message – can be image and text working together)
  • Decoration (Embellishing to increase attractiveness and get attention)

Noise are all the things that interfere with the intended message.  In the arts, as in other sectors, an important issue remains learning to reduce the noise in our marketing and to focus on the most important audience motivation to connect an experience with that audience. Because, ineffective marketing – the kind that has no clear message which means there is no redundancy or useful embellishment, and therefore there is no noise reduction – results simply in information overload which humans are designed to simply dismiss and more often leads to “No.” 

Embracing the challenge of simplicity means honing a more rigorous exploration process that has the power to connect your art / product / service / experience with your intended audience.

Marketing Trends: New Media as The Media

Marketing has changed irrevocably over the last 10 to 15 years. While the harbingers of consumer power were evident in the late 1990s, with the advent of the Internet and mobile and then smart phones, the changes have now solidified and they continue to accelerate.

The web is no longer a new media. The body of knowledge and practice of integrated marketing has grown up.

Integration of websites with social networks and mobile apps

Youtube was launched in 2005, Facebook and Twitter came into the public view in 2006. Barely approaching a decade old they have an unprecedented reach ranging from 500 million to 1+ billion users.

Recently, smart phones with touch screens, tablets and e-readers with web access have become ubiquitous.

Great websites have evolved from early “brochure-sites”, UseNet groups and List Serves to well functioning hubs of branded transactions with considerable social media integration and mobile connectivity.

Seemingly limitless access to information, easy consumption of entertainment, and creation and sharing of content and experiences have transformed how we behave, what we expect and what we want.

Contemporary marketing more than ever is about compelling stories, co-creating meaning, and making research and purchases easy and immediate. The increasing integration of services like Youtube, Facebook, Twitter and many more – with both desktops and mobile devices and within websites – creates new dynamics between organizations and their customers.

Today, website pages can be shared with a push of a button to a user’s social media universe. They can be used to amplify a use’s own brand and they can be used to ridicule or support an organization or a product. It can raise awareness, start conversations or elicit sales through these wider social networks. Similarly, organizations are cross-linking their web sites and social media presence to provide a seamless user experience, going where users are.

Do-it-yourself

Websites used to be expensive custom installations, with the best requiring substantial user research and expert programmers.

Today, WordPress and similar services have become robust DIY web tools that work well, have extensive plug-in options for customization and keep costs low.

Many of these off-the-shelf options also have an embedded option to create a mobile-friendly version of a websites. This is important as more and more users visit websites using their mobile devices and their much smaller screens.

Mobile applications

The ‘appification’ of the online experience has advanced rapidly in the last five years to the point, where man of us retain little awareness that apps use online content, i.e. content that resides on a server elsewhere. The best apps are content and feature rich, while super simply to use.

Festivals have embraced them to deliver a variety of information and on-site experiences. Here again, there is a build it once and sell it many times philosophy, enabling affordable, ready-made solutions to almost any size event.

Today, apps live on non-standard operating systems, i.e. apps are developed for the various platforms of smart phones. That means, if resources require development for just one platform, considerable thought has to go into who the target market is and the dominant platforms in use.

The power of accessing rich content through tiny devices that one carries everywhere creates a brand new dynamic of relationship to and expectation of brands.