Some orchestra marketers found that the churn study confirmed insights their own sharply honed instincts had already suggested. For example, Kim Noltemy of the Boston Symphony Orchestra (BSO) had long recognized the importance of demand variation. She’d developed special marketing programs focused on the customer set where demand was weakest—people under the age of forty, the symphony supporters of the future.
To boost demand for classical music among the young, Noltemy and the BSO have developed product offers that addressed their unique needs. For school-age youngsters and their parents, the Boston Pops’ Holiday Pops and Spring Pops concerts have long been designed to be family-friendly, with cabaret-style seating and food service so that restless kids can eat during the performance. Noltemy spearheaded the addition of special Kids Matinees with customized menus and streamlined programs that cater to youngsters’ shorter attention spans. To engage teenagers, free tickets subsidized by a generous donor are provided for kids up to eighteen years old at daytime concerts at the Tanglewood Music Center, in the Berkshires. For just $10, high school students can hear the symphony at an open dress rehearsal that includes a context-setting talk by a performer (one of the product features, you’ll recall, that trialists find most magnetic). College students can attend their choice of dozens of concerts at Symphony Hall every season just by buying a $25 college card (between 200 and 400 show up every night). And yet another donor-subsidized program lets the BSO provide cut-rate $20 tickets to customers under forty years of age.
“We put the college students and thirtysomethings in some of the best seats in the house, right up front,” Noltemy says. “Our older subscribers enjoy seeing them there, knowing that the music they love is attracting a new generation of fans.” (It’s interesting: People like it when goods they favor become popular with a larger, younger audience—a social element of demand that’s often overlooked but quite powerful.)
Thanks to initiatives like these, the BSO’s annual audience now numbers more than 12 percent of the metro area population, a higher penetration rate than that enjoyed by any other major U.S. orchestra. (The figure in San Francisco, for example, is around 6 percent; in New York, just about 3.) On Noltemy’s watch, the BSO’s list of participating households has grown from around 16,000 to more than 45,000. Perhaps most impressive, the average age of subscribers has actually fallen from fifty-eight to forty-eight, defying trends that are troubling other orchestras, and demonstrating that specially tailored offerings can spark fresh demand for classical music among younger audiences.
The lessons of the churn study don’t spell an end to the challenges facing American orchestras. Persuading members of the hip-hop generation to give classical music a try remains an uphill battle. But the concept of demand variation offers hope. Tomorrow’s customers are out there, waiting to be discovered, if leaders can only put on the right lenses to see them in all their diversity, to decipher what makes them tick, and to know what, how, and at what prices they will buy.
THE SEATTLE OPERA GROWS ITS AUDIENCE
ONE MEMBER AT A TIME
Perhaps the most impressive organization responding to demand variation to grow future customers for classical music is the Seattle Opera, a powerhouse company that manages to hold its own by comparison with bigger, older rivals in much larger cities. (As Rebecca Chawgo, the opera’s associate director of individual giving, puts it, “A city the size of Seattle simply should not have an opera company like the Seattle Opera.”)
Seattle’s secret weapon: a set of programs developed by a former high school teacher with an amazing talent for touching hearts and minds. The story of Perry Lorenzo is a case study in how a personal passion can get transformed into a virus that, eventually, infects an entire city—one customer type at a time.
Speight Jenkins, general director of the Seattle Opera, first encountered Lorenzo back in the late 1980s, when the company was not yet a demand-building dynamo. Lorenzo taught humanities and coached the debate team at Kennedy High School, a Catholic school in the Seattle suburb of Burien, and he invited Jenkins to judge an annual contest in which teams of students created sets and costumes for an imaginary opera production. Jenkins was astonished by the quality and sophistication of the student projects. Lorenzo modestly deflected Jenkins’s praise, but it was obvious that here was an unusually gifted teacher and communicator.
Jenkins recruited Lorenzo to direct a new education department for the opera. Lorenzo had found his calling, one he would pursue for seventeen years, until his untimely death from lung cancer in December 2009.
One of Lorenzo’s role models was Leonard Bernstein, the New York Philharmonic maestro whose legendary Young People’s Concerts, broadcast on CBS television from 1958 to 1973, used clever stagecraft, vivid musical examples, and the personal passion of a charismatic performer to introduce a generation of Americans to the wonders of classical music. Guided by instinct and his own boyish spirit, Bernstein had cracked the code for attracting the young to great music, almost as the churn project later did for orchestra trialists. As soon as Bernstein DVDs were available, Lorenzo bought a complete set to study and passed them around to his colleagues on the education team.
Inspired by Bernstein’s example, Lorenzo developed a collection of brand-new musical products specifically designed to make opera intensely attractive for high school age kids. His motto was, “Prepare, experience, respond.” He carried it out by providing detailed information kits that teachers could use to prepare their students before a trip to the opera—for example, helping a social studies teacher prep a class for a performance of Tosca by explaining the story’s context in the history of the Italian city-states during the Napoleonic era, or giving an English teacher materials with which to compare Verdi’s Falstaff with Shakespeare’s. Then he worked with teachers to help their students respond to the opera experience by writing reviews (for an English class), sketching or painting their impressions (for an art class), or preparing a report on the social implications of the conflict depicted (for a history class). Many current subscribers to the Seattle Opera—as well as members of the opera company’s staff—vividly recall getting hooked on opera as sixteen-year-olds entranced by a Perry Lorenzo talk before a dress rehearsal.
Especially remarkable is the product Lorenzo created for an even younger customer set, elementary school students, under the title of Opera Goes to School. A team of teaching artists—singers, musicians, and other performers—visits a lucky school and takes up residence there for an intense week, during which they work with some sixty fifth graders to mount a full production of a specially crafted one-hour opera. It might be The Magic Flute: A Hero’s Quest, adapted by Lorenzo and Tony Curry from the Mozart classic; Theft of the Gold, adapted from Wagner’s Ring of the Nibelung by Jonathan Dean, Lorenzo’s protégé (and now Seattle Opera’s director of public programs and media); or Dean’s sequel, Siegfried and the Ring of Fire. Young musicians learn the score under a director’s tutelage; other students perform in the chorus or as master dancers; still others work on lighting, sets, and costumes.
Getting a chance to attend an opera is a great experience for a schoolchild. But spending a week immersed in actually performing an opera—and a “real” opera at that, not a musical version of “The Three Little Pigs” or some other children’s tale—is an amazing opportunity that few fifth graders who experience it will ever forget.
At the end of the week, the opera is performed in front of the entire school as well as family members, friends, and people from the neighborhood. Like other great demand creators, Perry Lorenzo realized that demand variation often includes broadening the definition of the “customer.” Opera Goes to School reaches beyond today’s ticket buyers to transform an entire community into music lovers—with many of them, ultimately, becoming ticket buyers, too.
The Seattle Opera’s education department now has plans to publish complete scores and librettos for its opera adaptations, together with detailed instructions on how they can be used to in
troduce young people to opera. It’s a brilliant and potentially powerful contribution to the cause of nurturing future audiences for opera throughout the nation. Imagine what the nation’s fifteen leading opera companies can do if they pool ideas and resources to create collaborative demand-building programs focused on crucial customer types—in this case, school-age kids. What they could accomplish to win converts to their beloved art form! And the same goes for the twenty-five best symphony orchestras, the top ten ballet companies, the fifteen best modern dance troupes …
Lorenzo also developed a series of powerful demand-creating programs aimed at specific customer types among adults. Before every new production, his education department team produces a flurry of community events to introduce the opera to groups such as arts lovers, university students, and avid readers. For example, in January 2010, Seattle Opera presented a new production of Il Trovatore. In the weeks before its premiere, preview lectures were presented, free of charge, at venues around the city ranging from the Frye Art Museum to Seattle University to public libraries in several neighborhoods. Radio previews were broadcast in several time slots on the major local classical station, and director Speight Jenkins gave a talk about the opera at the city’s beloved Elliott Bay Book Company. It’s frankly difficult to imagine living in Seattle during this multimedia assault and not being aware that Il Trovatore was coming to town.
Another crucial customer type is young people in their twenties and thirties (one of the groups, you’ll recall, that Kim Noltemy targeted for the Boston Symphony). For many of them, the social aspect of classical music is its most magnetic feature—even twenty-somethings who are lukewarm about opera enjoy a night out with friends, and in the process some get hooked on the music. In response, the Seattle Opera has developed a collection of powerful social tools for attracting demand from this customer set. They range from its active podcast, Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube programs (which provide content to thousands of people daily) to the Bravo Club, a social group for people in their twenties and thirties that numbers over seven hundred members and helps draw them painlessly into the opera experience. When the Seattle Opera staged Bizet’s The Pearl Fishers, a member hosted a “Pearls and Fishnets” celebration at the local bar he owns; other Bravo Club activities have included a fund-raiser in Seattle’s famous Space Needle restaurant and overnight trips to nearby wine-tasting events. These cost-effective enhancements to the Seattle Opera’s product attract hundreds of young people, some of whom will become enthusiastic members of tomorrow’s core audience for opera.
Speight Jenkins became general director of the Seattle Opera in 1983 after years as a music-loving journalist, critic, and editor of Opera News. Like many other great demand creators, Jenkins brought an outsider’s sensibility to an industry that was ready for a shakeup—think of trader Mike Bloomberg revolutionizing the media business, online merchant Jeff Bezos developing a breakthrough electronic device, educational novice Wendy Kopp transforming American schools, or one-time surveyor Julian Metcalfe changing the world’s lunch habits. In similar fashion, Jenkins has helped the Seattle Opera embrace audience-friendly change—for example, in 1984, it became one of the first opera companies in the world to use the new technology of “supertitles” to make lyrics and dialogue easier to follow. And Jenkins’s passion makes him an untiring salesman for great music; he claims he’s never taken a plane flight on which he hasn’t convinced at least one fellow passenger to try the opera.
Under Jenkins’s leadership, the Seattle Opera has achieved demand growth that is nothing short of spectacular, increasing its budget more than ninefold (from around $3 million in 1983 to almost $28 million in 2009–2010). And having built America’s most dynamic opera audience by using Perry Lorenzo’s brilliant product variation strategies, Speight Jenkins takes pains to stay in touch with the thousands of varied, ever-evolving individuals who make up his customer base. After every Seattle Opera performance, Jenkins himself appears for a question-and-answer session with the audience. It’s a late-night finale to a long day of work, but Jenkins says, “I wouldn’t miss it. After all, this is my best opportunity to get feedback and ideas from the audience.” Thanks to the success of his company in turning Seattle into one of the most opera-loving cities in the nation, Speight Jenkins has been named one of the twenty-five “most powerful” people in American opera as well as one of the 150 “most influential” people in shaping the character of Seattle.
IMPRESSED AND FASCINATED by the stories we’d heard about Opera Goes to School, we asked a member of the Seattle Opera’s Young Artists Program to explain its impact on the families she’d met. The young soprano told us about the mom and dad who approached her after one fifth-grade performance.
“We don’t know what you people do,” the woman said, “but you’ve done something incredible with our daughter. She came home from school the other day, and she was singing—singing! She never sang before. Never!
“I asked her, ‘How was your day at school?’ Usually she just shrugs, and says, ‘Nothing much.’ Not this time. She couldn’t stop talking about Siegfried and the Ring of Fire, how her classmates had worked together to prepare the stage, how the kids in the orchestra had been practicing their parts, how she and her friends in the chorus were learning the score. She went on and on, full of energy. I couldn’t believe it!
“I don’t know what you people do,” the woman said again, “but you changed our daughter’s life. It’s a little miracle.”
Whereupon the young soprano launched into a detailed, engaging explanation of exactly what opera people do. She recognized it as another opportunity to spread the benign virus of musical passion … the kind of opportunity that the Seattle Opera people never pass up.
Stories like this tell us that, twenty years from now, the chances are very good that the Seattle Opera will continue to thrive … selling tickets, yes, but more important, changing lives. And they illustrate how a genuine understanding of variation can help an organization nurture demand not just for today, but for future generations.
DEMAND VARIATION, FROM THE CORNER
STORE TO EUROSTAR, THE EIGHTH
WONDER OF THE WORLD
You might think that demand variation is of concern mainly to big companies that serve thousands of customers from many different demographic segments. In fact, small businesses—even mom-and-pop stores—that thrive in the face of competition from huge corporate rivals often do so largely by using the power of variation to create deep connections with individual customers. Three businesses from our own neighborhood of Cambridge, Massachusetts, offer vivid examples of how it works.
Fresh Pond Market was founded in 1922 by Armenian immigrant Nish Semonian. Eighty years and three generations later, it is still going strong—despite the presence of bigger, more convenient, and definitely cheaper big-box food stores within a few minutes’ drive.
Fresh Pond Market reminds you of other places you’ve loved—warm, open, inviting, well organized, but not sterile. It’s always busy, but rarely packed or overcrowded. The produce bins are old-fashioned, but the fruits and vegetables always look fresh and beautifully arranged; the variety of canned goods isn’t quite as wide as you’d find in a superstore, but it includes enough unusual delicacies to pique your interest; the wine and beer section offers unfamiliar wines from Argentina and Portugal and New Zealand that are worth a try. The total visual package sends a clear message: This is food on a human scale. And the proprietors take advantage of that scale to address different needs at the single-customer level. In effect, they’ve made Fresh Pond Market into a store that enables them to provide goods and services tailored to the specific needs and wishes of the individuals who shop with them.
Marc Najarian, the founder’s grandson, shares an example or two:
What we do here is treat people as if they were members of our family. We know them, we help them. For example, if there’s a product they want and can’t get elsewhere, I’ll say, “Let me see what we can do.” Mrs. Wi
lson’s husband likes almond butter. We tracked it down, and now we get it for him. We do that lots of times.
People also love our meat department. Not only is it great product but they can get exactly the cut they want. It’s a huge, huge draw for us, and of course once they’re in the store to get a steak or some chops they buy other stuff as well.
It’s possible that the manager of a grocery chain store might order a specific product for an individual customer—a jar of almond butter, a certain cut of steak—as a one-time service. But it’s unlikely he’ll remember to keep that product routinely on order as Marc Najarian does; the scale and complexity of the business simply make it impossible. Fresh Pond Market may lack some of the advantages of a chain like Stop & Shop, but it can create offer variation at the individual customer level, an edge that Marc Najarian makes the most of.
We asked Marc about the extensive wine department, a feature most neighborhood grocery stores don’t offer:
Ah, that’s a funny story. My grandfather Nish didn’t really want to sell liquor. But he finally agreed to sell wines and sherries as a favor to Judge Coonahan, who lived in the neighborhood and wanted to buy his wine at our place. It was just a small section in the back.
I got serious about it in the sixties and spent the time to figure it out and build up the department. Our customers love it today. It’s not enormous, but it has a terrific selection, and because I’m always talking to the customers I know what adjustments to make—what new varieties to try, what countries and regions are hot. It’s like the meat department—it brings them in, and they buy other things, and it’s a good contributor to the business.
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