The Hard Sell

LAURIE PIPER is the Marketing Manager at Eden Court Theatre, and explains the importance of marketing in keeping the flagship theatre viable

LAURIE PIPER joined Eden Court as Marketing Manager in January 2008. He took a degree in Marketing at Stirling University, while simultaneously working in the box office at the Macrobert Centre on the Stirling campus.

He took on the running of the jazz club at the University for Assembly Direct, and spent vacations working in Edinburgh for the International Festival, the Book Festival, the Jazz Festival and Unique Events. He was Marketing Office at the Jazz Festival before moving south to take up a post at the Theatre By The Lake in Keswick, which was being rebuilt at the time.

Laurie Piper, Marketing Manager, Eden Court Theatre (photo - Kenny Mathieson)

He missed Scotland, and returned to take up a job in marketing for an electronics company, but “eventually got bored of corporate life” and went back to working in the arts as a freelance. He worked on events that allowed him to indulge his joint interests in the arts and outdoors, including Edinburgh’s Hogmanay, the World Mountain Bike Championship in Fort William, the O’Neill Surfing Championships in Thurso, and Highland 2007, before taking up his post at Eden Court, where he heads a small department.

KENNY MATHIESON spoke to Laurie for NORTHINGS, and began by asking him about the marketing department he took over at Eden Court.

LAURIE PIPER: I did a lot of work up here with H2007, and when this job came up at the end of that it seemed a fantastic opportunity. For a theatre of this size we have a very small and tight department. Many of my colleagues elsewhere are aghast that we handle marketing and press and external relations and promotion and all kinds of things. We run all the campaigns for the various festivals based here, the panto and so on.

We have a staff of three, which is temporarily down to two, but we hope to have a new person in by early May. One other area we will be looking to develop is group sales – the school groups, or the businesses that want a night out and so on. We’ll be appointing a half-time post to work on that.

If we don’t sell a lot of tickets, we won’t be here, simple as that, and we need to maintain our track record constantly

KENNY MATHIESON: What is the significance of marketing to a theatre like Eden Court?

LAURIE PIPER: It’s vital. I know I would say that, but I believe it is absolutely true. It’s about awareness. Marketing takes the customer from unaware to aware, from disinterest to interest to decision and doing something about it, which in our case is buying a ticket to see a show here.

If people don’t know about it they are not going to come it is definitely not a case of “build it and they will come!”. We need to show people that we are here, that we have things they may be interested in. There are many people who currently come only to the panto and nothing else, for example, and from a marketing point of view they are more likely to increase their rate of attendance than someone who already comes ten times a year.

KENNY MATHIESON: So they become prime targets?

LAURIE PIPER: We have to try to reach them and interest them, and that is where marketing and press are vital. Here these two functions are seamless. Theatre and the arts can transform lives, and if we can get kids coming here for face-painting or whatever, they are not going to be afraid of theatre later on, or look on it as something scary or not for them.

KENNY MATHIESON: You mentioned selling tickets earlier – how much of setback were the problems that the theatre had in getting the on-line booking system up-and-running at the end of last year?

LAURIE PIPER: Happily our website now works for bookings, which has taken over a year, and was one of the few things that wasn’t developed when the building was completed. It required a complex solution, and getting the box office system to work with our information website was very tricky.

We found really good designers who worked tirelessly on it, but since we launched it at the end of December we have sold over a £150,000 worth of tickets on our site, we get 4,000 unique visitors a week, we have 10,000 people signed up to our e-news electronic updates list, and the website is one of our main ways of telling people what goes on.

Eden Court Theatre's website

KENNY MATHIESON: Do you acknowledge that there was lost business in the year or so that it took? Anecdotal evidence suggests that was the case.

LAURIE PIPER: Yes, I do, and I don’t think anyone here would disagree that we missed opportunities in that period. We should have been able to sell tickets on-line to people who couldn’t get through on the phone when we first opened.

We had 30,000 calls in our first week, and even if we had stayed opened 24 hours we couldn’t have answered them. How many of those people didn’t try again we don’t know. We do know anecdotally we lost sales, and one of the great challenges is that when we do know something is wrong or a customer hasn’t had what they wanted, we fix it.

KENNY MATHIESON: People have complained quite a bit about it …

LAURIE PIPER: Yes, and it is one of the things we have worked really hard on over the past year, and I think we are at the point where we provide a good level of service in the box office. We constantly monitor the number of calls that come in, and average waiting time now is around a minute – at times it was 15 or 16 minutes.

It’s important to get all aspects of that service right. On-line sales are not the only answer. Not everyone is on-line or wants to use it, so we still need the telephone and personal counter service and we still need a good quality brochure.

KENNY MATHIESON: So print has not been usurped by the web?

LAURIE PIPER: Print is still very important to us. I came up in this business on creating good quality sales print, and that is something else that we have worked very hard on. I think the brochure has improved with each new one we have done. It now runs for four months rather than three, so they are larger and run longer, but there is an overall cost saving.

When the January to April brochure with the Sunshine on Leith cover came out, our box office was inundated for a fortnight, and that had not happened with any of the other brochures to that point. I was particularly proud of that one, and the next one is going to be even better.

I feel Eden Court has a particular voice, a particular identity, and a particular place in people’s minds here in the Highlands – it is not a place that you come only if you are interested in high art, and I think our brochure and our direct marketing reflects that.

KENNY MATHIESON: On the subject of direct marketing, I have noticed a major increase in targeted mail-outs in the past few months – has that effort increased?

Howard Goodall and Rambert dancer (photo - Carl Fox)

LAURIE PIPER: Yes, it has. We did a number of extras in the past few months. It comes back to the fact that you can’t neglect your customer core, and there are things that you can do with a letter and a piece of print that you can’t achieve through a website or any other way.

We target not only people who we know are interested in a particular company or art form, but we also look at possible overlap. Our classical music customers might be interested in the fact that Howard Goodall has composed a score for Rambert Dance, for example, so we mailed the people on our orchestral subscription list and Scottish Ensemble subscribers and so on.
With that example we had a good response – we did a mail-out of 750, and sold around 160 tickets directly from that, which is a good take-up. A more dance-oriented mail-out for the same show sold well over two hundred more, so that is quite a lot of tickets, even if we allow that some of those people might have bought them anyway.

KENNY MATHIESON: So you see the mail-outs as good value?

LAURIE PIPER: We do use the web and lots of other things, but there are customers who simply like a letter through the door, and we know when people don’t like that because they tell us. Our customers generally tell us what they like and what they don’t like, and we are very happy with that. We believe we get value for money from the mail-outs, and even if we don’t, I would rather try and work on something than just not bother.

The other things that sometimes surprises people who promote their events here is that we treat the big companies and the small companies in the same way when it comes to a marketing effort. Whether you are the National Theatre or Theatre Hebrides, you still get the same level of service from us.

There are lots of small producers and cultural crofters in the Highlands, and we feel it as our duty to do as much as we can for them when they come here – The Tailor of Inverness is the latest example of that, and a huge success. It sold out every performance, and we are bringing it back in May.

KENNY MATHIESON: What other marketing tools are available to you?

LAURIE PIPER: We have made use of outdoor advertising on the buses in Inverness, which is quite successful because there are no bus shelters here for big posters. Sunshine on Leith was a good example – a lot of customers told us they found out about it through seeing it on the side of a bus.

We have regular features on local radio, and we will take some of the performers into the studio during longer running shows as well. I know if I go into the studio and talk about a show on a Friday morning, when I get back to the theatre the box office will be getting calls about it. It’s very useful for cinema, where there is not as long a lead time for marketing as in the theatre shows.

KENNY MATHIESON: How about web-based developments like Facebook and Twitter?

LAURIE PIPER: Yes, we use those as well. Social networking has worked for us, with our dance ambassadors for example, but it was hard work. There are some things that will always work, and others may be this year’s thing and gone next year, especially some of the on-line things, which is a very fast-changing environment.

We are lucky here with the local press as well. They tend to be both interested and knowledgeable, and we have good relationships with all of them. We try to spend our advertising budget as wisely as possible, but there is a rule of thumb in the PR world that says that editorial coverage is worth two-and-half-times advertising space in terms of return.

It is all part of the marketing tool-kit, and you can’t take one piece away without impacting elsewhere.

KENNY MATHIESON: Do you have any involvement with programming?

Eden Court Theatre brochure

LAURIE PIPER: Colin (Marr) and Roz (Bell) are the driving forces behind programming, but I have regular weekly meetings with them where we look at things that have been offered to us, and look at issues like probable demand for it and the likelihood of selling tickets, and how much work and expense we might have to put in to selling it, which can vary enormously.

We will always try to programme the work of the Highland companies, and we feel we have a responsibility to do so.

KENNY MATHIESON: How about the argument that Eden Court gets lots of public subsidy and should be above the commercial cut-and-thrust?

LAURIE PIPER: It’s a perception I hear, and it is worth putting on record again that it is a misconception. Although we received a lot of money to do up the building, our revenue grant has stayed static, if not actually decreased over the years, and costs have gone the other way.

We do get healthy grants from The Scottish Government, the Scottish Arts Council and Highland Council, but they make up the lesser part of what we need to keep this theatre running. If we don’t sell a lot of tickets, we won’t be here, simple as that, and we need to maintain our track record constantly.

We try to spend our money well and effectively, and I would say that we provide amazing value for money across our operations, whether it is the theatre or our education department or whatever. We are always looking at the bottom line and working on doing things more efficiently without compromising quality.

© Kenny Mathieson, 2009

Links

• Eden Court Theatre