Festival Marketing

Marketing, promotion, sales, communications, audiences, participation – the concepts covered in this section are a fundamental part of festival management, whether your event is a community fête or a globally recognised music festival. The word ‘marketing’ originated from the simple forms of buying and selling that can be seen in a local street market, but the term now encompasses a range of sophisticated techniques that have developed to help companies decide what products and services to produce and how to persuade people to buy them. This chapter introduces marketing concepts and illustrates how festivals and cultural events can adapt the techniques to develop appropriate experiences for festival-goers, artists and communities. This chapter will introduce concepts such as supply and demand, segmentation and targeting, CRM (customer relationship management), experience marketing and its relationship to service design, and branding. It will raise questions about the extent to which a festival’s artistic programme can or should be led by market demand, whether the relationship between artists and festival-goers is more complex than those expected in traditional marketing models and about the ethics of storing and using data collected on festival-goers’ behaviours and preferences.