“I never knew the British Museum would do an exhibition related to manga… it kind of showed me that it is thinking outside the box.”
Manga exhibition attender, British Museum
It can be a daunting prospect creating a marketing campaign to unlock a brand new audience of atypical visitors. It can be even more challenging if you’re hoping to do this without alienating your existing audiences. Perhaps there might be a way of doing both these things, and even deepening engagement with your regular attenders?
Culture Segments offers a way of thinking strategically about marketing campaigns for current and potential visitors, and avoiding falling into tired tropes about demographic likes and dislikes.
Western Australia Opera strategically embedded Culture Segments across the whole organisation, providing a shared language for all staff. They started using Culture Segments TagTool to tag bookers and deliver segmented messaging in 2018 and have since developed a segmented approach to their campaigns with phenomenal results.
The British Museum were looking to attract a more diverse audience for a manga exhibition, and in harnessing the power of Culture Segments achieved a sold-out exhibition that attracted its youngest, most ethnically diverse audience ever, smashing ticketing targets, and breaking records for first time attenders. By not trying to ‘appeal to young people’, but by appealing to the underlying values and interests of certain segments, traditional British Museum audiences were maintained in combination with these gains.
Through Culture Segments TagTool, the theatre is constantly capturing audience members’ segments and writing this back to its CRM system. This builds a rich picture of who’s coming and tracking how well email campaigns are engaging different segments.
Although manga is huge in popular culture, it didn’t guarantee the British Museum's exhibition would attract a more diverse audience. Formative research showed manga enthusiasts feared the Museum would spoil the subject matter.
West Australian Opera (WAO) established in 1967, has been Western Australia’s only full-time, professional opera company for over 50 years.
