The impact of target marketing on developing a culturally diverse audience

The purpose of this study is to determine the effectiveness of target marketing for the development of a culturally diverse audience for professional theatre companies. The execution of a target marketing experiment in conjunction with the University Players' spring 1998 production of The Colored Museum, as well as feedback from marketing surveys that were sent to a select group of regional theatres, serve as the basis of methodology for substantiating this study. Recent marketing and arts management literature as well as a national study on audience participation in theatre, conducted by the National Endowment for the Arts in 1996, also were used to validate further this study's contention.;The results of this study indicate that the implementation of target marketing strategies can have a significant impact on the development of a culturally diverse audience and can potentially convert single ticket buyers to long-term subscribers. In some cases, the ethnic ratio of an audience for a given play was increased by 40-50 percent due to the execution of target marketing strategies. Three of the regional theatres included in the survey indicated that, as a result of target marketing campaigns, they were able to increase subscriptions from Asian, Hispanic, and African Americans in the 18-24 year age range from 2 percent to 20 percent over a two to three-year period.