Category: Hope Tarney-Peters

Throughout the process one of the main things we had to consider through the marketing and the show is how cohesive it all was, how well it all worked together. One main way of doing this was having a colour scheme we settled on a dark rich purple, that you would associate with Cadburys, a turquoise blue and a warm grey. The purple is present in our company logo as well as the show logo, and other work, clearly and noticeably linking them.

The only struggle I have had with the creation of posters and flyers was that I wanted something that would clearly link to our show, but with it being in the development process it was hard to find one image that could reflect it without have a finished piece. Some themes that were constant throughout the process however were the use of shoes and the different stages of life, almost like a time line.

We used a converse style shoe as our main image, as it is very universally known shoe and as it was a white shoe it worked well with the injection of our colour scheme around it. We also used very long ribbons as the laces; it reflects our idea of a time line. This however was also affected by the con of not having a final piece, as we were originally going to use the ribbon in a choreographed dance piece in the performance but instead this was developed into a more realistic tender moment of a dance between a couple, it no longer linked back to the marketing but it did work better with the rest of the show.

We also made sure we used the same images online as well as the same fonts throughout or work, Dk Snemand and Krinkes can be seen in the poster, flyers, programme and marketing pack.

We definetly had a development of the image throughout our process from our very first copy image to the one used as our poster at the end, the ability to learn new skills has been vital to our visual marketing as I have learnt how to use a DSLR camera, lighting and photoshop to create a more polished and proffesional product in the end.

 

“Through the power of distinctive, dynamic design, businesses can harness the immense potential of event branding – but it’s only through an intelligent and cohesive approach that you’ll experience the full effect.” (Atkinson, 2015) Haveing a few products, the flyers, posters, online presence and programmes, it is important that they all stay recongnisable, making sure we avoid creating any confusion and instead send out a clear message that tells a viewer about our show and how they can access all the information about it. Minus the copy image I believe we achieved this and therefore were able to build a strong relationship with our audience. Our colour scheme  and the use of shoes instead of a person on our work allowed us stand out from many other companies.

Atikinson, Tori. 2015. Experiential Design: the Importance of Cohesive Event Branding. London.

-Hope

 

Going off our target audience, specified in our marketing pack, we had to make sure we could spread the word to them effectively, the best way of doing this, away from social media, is the distribution of flyers and posters. One of our main audiences is students, as our production is by students but also because a lot of the themes in our piece are aimed at people going through some of the big stages and changes in adult life, in our show we established this as Job/Higher education, we therefore put posters up around campus, focusing on the media building the library and the main building as these got the main influx of people. To get a local audience of ages 15 and above we created a flyering plan.

Distribution of flyers

There is a massive importance of interacting with customers in person as well as online, though there is definitely a need to have an online presence now as most people use social media on a daily basis and the ability to find out about shows and buy tickets for them all online, the Creative Arts Marketing resource states the importance of speaking to the audiences in person and not just online. “The danger of such a comprehensive system is, of course, information overload and the temptation to interact with computers rather than people.” (Hill and O’sullivan, 2003, p.5)

For this in person flyering we needed to establish who our target audience is so using A flat-pack guide to marketing the arts we first tried to establish who our existing audiences are, these are people that are: “reliable, likely to attend frequently, likely to be your highest spenders, comfortable with your product, comfortable with your communications, relatively cheap to communicate with.” (Griffin, 2007, p.21)

For us these are mainly students from the university of Lincoln, they tend to be mainly drama and media students that frequently see work at LPAC and would easily accept our work. Another group of people that fit in this would be family and friends of the company who would likely be the higher spenders and easy to communicate the show to.

To gain a bigger sale of tickets we needed to look at bringing in new audiences Caroline Griffin says that to do this we need to look for “the regular audiences of the future, fresh and excited about your activities, likely to help you meet your social objectives”. (Griffin, 2007, p.21) To gain these we needed to market to the types of people that feature in our show, so to look at the structure of our show it is broken down into five different sections:

Growing up-so we can aim at school children, emailing schools with information about the show.

Job and Higher education- so we can aim at people at university and in starter jobs. Putting posters up around campus and flyering around the high street.

Finding the one- Maybe promoting in bars and cafés, areas where people would tend to be on dates or trying to meet someone.

Becoming a parent- This is a rather broad section as it can apply to lots of people, so to be more specific trying to promoting in community centres where there may be parenting groups meeting and promoting to the parents of our company.

Growing Old- Online promotion may not work for this section, so flyering in person and flyering at events such as heritage events around Lincoln.
Using this knowledge and the distribution plan the whole company got involved with flyering around lincoln.

 

Griffin, Caroline. 2007. This way up, A flat-pack guide to marketing the Arts. Arts Council England: Cambridge

Hill, Liz. O’Sullivan, Catherine. O’Sullivan, Terry. Creative Arts Marketing. Oxford: Butterworth

-Hope

marketing pack

As part of the Shoes to Fill paper marketing I created a marketing pack that can be sent to venues, newspapers, radio stations and anyone wishing to know the in depth details about our show and the company. The pack was inspired by work produced by the theatre company Sleepdogs for their show ‘The Bullet and the Bass Trombone’ as they would be aiming at the same type of target audience as we are:

“The Bullet and the Bass Trombone will appeal to:

-Audiences for contemporary theatre and performance, who like companies and artists such as Chris Thorpe, Forced Entertainment, Goat Island, Chris Goode, Melanie Wilson, Samuel Beckett, Pina Bausch, Elevator Repair Service

-Audiences for storytelling and comedy who like performers such as Stewart Lee and Daniel Kitson

-Audiences for contemporary music who like artists such as Aphex Twin, Gavin Bryers, Michael Nyman, Steve Reich, Philip Glass, Bjork, The Books, Nick Cave, Velvet Underground, Tom Waits

-Literature audiences who like Angela Carter, The Master and Margarita,

-Film audiences who like the Cohen Brothers, Jim Jarmusch, Andrei Tarkovsky

-Audiences interested in fantasy and science fiction

-Audiences with a knowledge of classical music

-Music students

-Theatre Studies students” (Sleepdogs, 2014)

Marketing Pack-Sleepdogs

Sleepdogs provide a detailed description who would enjoy their work, including companies and shows they are similar to, this makes a venues job very easy as can use their database, built up of information about previous audience members, showing what they have been to see before and they can then target this show at them. The audience members are getting concise information about shows that are aimed at their interests, instead of a big email or newsletter that has information that isn’t relevant to them. We tried our best to create a similar version for our show that can be sent to the Lincoln Performing Arts Centre marketing manager Julie Ellerby. “segmentation, which involves aiming at particular sections of the market rather than taking a scattergun approach”. (Hill and O’sullivan, 2003, p.5)

“-Theatre student audiences

-Music students

-Students in general

-Audiences that enjoy verbatim and documentary theatre, performances life vagina monologues and Sleepdog’s The Bullet and The bass Trombone

–Audiences that enjoy kitchen sink drama and naturalistic performance

-Audiences that enjoy music in theatre.

-Ideally for ages 15 and above, anyone that has had to face the ideas of their future (or their past) and what they are going to do with their lives.” (Forefront Theatre, 2015)

Along with target audiences the marketing pack also includes selling point that can be matched with previous shows that were similar and again find audiences through their database. Another important aspect of this pack was to provide a show copy that can be used by the venue in their programme for that season, especially important for our show as it was part of a special final degree show festival.

“Have you ever been daunted by the thought of filling someone’s shoes? To follow in the footsteps of your parents, your sibling or your role-model. To make them proud. You could be like them. Grow up, become an adult, get a job, have a family, get a dog and have a baby…or not. Using original songs, verbatim and our superficial ideas of aspiring to be like our role models; we will explore the shoes some people want to fill.” (Forefront Theatre, 2015)

 

Hill, Liz. O’Sullivan, Catherine. O’Sullivan, Terry. Creative Arts Marketing. Oxford: Butterworth

Sleepdogs. 2014. The Bullet and the Bass Trombone, Sleepdogs, Marketing Pack. Bristol.

Forefront. 2015. Shoes to Fill, Forefront, Marketing Pack. Lincoln.

-Hope

The change from adults, to the big scary world, to growing up, to finally the stages society thinks we need to go through.

There have been some big changes to our ideas in the past few weeks and this has meant that we needed to rethink our marketing. One thing we have all settled on is the use of shoes in our piece and the name Shoes to Fill. The connotations that come with the idea of filling someone’s shoes brought up lots of peoples personal stories about when they have had to follow in someone’s footsteps or have had a lot to live up to, I can see this is something we are all passionate about.

To look at some descriptions of what shoes to fill means it comes up with a lot about having to do someone thing that someone has done before, mainly jobs and it tends to mean that the person before did a very well at that job and it would be hard to it justice after them.

“Fill somebody’s shoes, also step into somebody’s shoes: to do what someone else has done as well as they did He was a great coach, and it’s not going to be easy to get someone to fill his shoes.” (Cambridge Dictionary, 200)

I believe we would approach this with the stereotypical shoes we have to fill meaning that they are certain paths that society expects us to take and if we personally think we should take them or there is another way for us. From a marketing stand point we could approach this in many ways as there are certain types of shoes that dictate certain jobs, for example a dirty tatty military boot may give you the idea that someone was in the army and something has happened to them for it to be in such a bad state or a shiny brogue give you the image of a business man. I think we can play off these pre-established stereotypes that we get from images and so I created some mock up poster ideas.

Cambridge Dictionary. 2003. Cambridge Dictionary of American Idioms. Cambridge University Press

-Hope