Moscow June 15th: Pleased to meet you don’t you know my name?

Moscow June 15th Pleased to meet you, who are you… will you come and see my play?

Today back at Meyerhold Theatre school with the Russian Theatre Leaders. Today we do work on audience segmentation and how to market to attract different types of people.

I refer to the MHN surveys in the UK which look at audience types and build marketing campaigns around groups likely (or indeed unlikely) to come to culture events.

http://mhminsight.com/articles/culture-segments-1179

The types are based on likely attendance at events based on beliefs and values as well as previous booking habits.

Done through surveys they are related to an Audience Atlas and if used correctly can really inform campaigns around who can be targeted in marketing terms. The types are difficult to translate and understand so being one step behind the theory and practice of using them I introduce the different types, talk briefly about how they might be used and move swiftly on to focus on using our intuition in marketing!

We look at my own  Hotbed Festival 2014…

http://www.menagerie.uk.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/01/Hotbed_Brochure_20141.pdf

This is our new writing theatre festival in July.

We analyse the possibility and probability of building audiences for each production and then see if we can work out how to get them to come to see the piece they are most likely to come to AND the piece they are least likely to come to.

It is fun and effective as we see the value in thinking about audience groupings and where we will find them and how much time and money we will or won’t spend on attracting them. We build on the promotion part of the business planning from day one and bring it full circle to their work in their own theatres.

The final exercise  today is to work in groups to spend a marketing budget on selling three different shows.

They each have three campaign approaches to build and present – one is a core approach, one is a risky or original approach and finally a totally crazy approach… they can spend the money given in any way they like but they must do all three campaigns… and  to add a twist, the campaigns are for segments of the audience that are classified as being be “unlikely” to  want to come to the productions.

The first is a 100,000 roubles marketing spend on an English Theatre Company (relatively unknown…!) bringing a new production to Moscow from a new writing festival… I wonder who that could be? The second group does the same production but with a million Roubles.

Some good ideas for me to steal if we ever get to do this… we will!

The other groups are working on a fictitious Musical based on Alice in Wonderland and the final group on Tolstoy’s’ short stories which are to be performed where they are set – you guessed it… in Crimea, Ukraine (Russia?)!!!

The Crazy Million Rouble campaign on the Tolstoy pieces includes reconstruction of the  invasion of Crimea on the beach with actors used to attract holiday makers to see the shows..!??!!

Lots of laughs and extreme marketing ideas – some of which are really pretty ingenious, including a campaign to get deaf people to come to the musical (although I wasn’t convinced by casting a deaf person in the show so his friends might come..???)…

All ends well… and then off to the theatre.

The marketing of the play I saw that night was obviously good as it was packed out at Taganka Theatre for the production of 1968.

Taganka is a very important theatre in Moscow It an art nouveau theatre building on Taganka square founded in 1964 by Turi Lybimov. Lybimov was a member of Mikhail Chekhov‘s Second Moscow Art Theatre from 1934 to 1936. During the 1930s, he also met our very own Vsevolod Meyerhold.

Lybimov is 96 and scheduled to direct again later this year!!

The play 1968 was interesting, hypnotic in places as they explored the year 1968 and the pressures from the West on Soviet society. Using poetry, song lyrics and verbatim text (or so I was told!) the actors wove a very interesting picture that clearly chimed with the audience:

http://www.themoscowtimes.com/arts_n_ideas/article/volkostrelov-resurrects-soviet-60s/5018%2015.html

The director Volkostrelov had been on Theatre Leaders course last year so was great to see his work. I am growing accustomed to seeing work in Russian and enjoy watching and absorbing more that just the meaning of the words. It forces you to focus on everything else so much more.

A good play well produced. and the audience? it was full (of course – this is Moscow!), who were they and why were they there though??!!

And the play even had the Rolling Stones’ music trying to crash its way into the action…

Pleased to meet you don’t you know my name… will you see my play??

one more day in Moscow to come and this was my reading to greet me for breakfast…!