Marketing managers for major orchestras had always assumed that convincing people to give the

symphony a try was the key to gaining subscribers. “Get people through the doors!” was their

mantra, assuming that the sheer beauty of the music would lure them back.

But when they actually studied the numbers, they discovered that getting new people wasn’t

the problem. They weren’t passing the audition. Customer churn was killing these orchestras.

It turns out the secret to unlocking demand for classical music–as for most products–is

discarding the Myth of the Average Customer. Designing a product offer to appeal to one

archetypal customer is always wasteful–one size fits few, not all. Instead, demand creators

have to constantly focus on demand variation, asking how customers differ from one another

and how those differences impact demand. This process of “de-averaging” can be complex, but

it offers huge opportunities.

In 2007, several orchestra managers joined forces to analyze their collective marketing

challenge. A pro bono third-party study by Oliver Wyman (Audience Growth Initiative) found

that on average, symphonies lost 55% of their customers each year; churn among first-time

concert-goers was 91%! The study also confirmed that the solution to churn was to move beyond

“averages” and to begin looking at the wide variations between starkly different customer

groups.

The symphony audience was divided into a core audience, trialists (first-time concert-goers),

non-committed (a few concerts a year), special occasion attendees, snackers (people who

purchase small subscriptions for years), and high potentials (frequent attendees who haven’t

bought a subscription). In Boston, for example, members of the Boston Symphony Orchestra

(BSO) core audience represented just 26% of the customer base but bought 56% of the tickets.

Trialists composed 37% of the base, but bought only 11% of the tickets. In monetary terms,

core audience members had a 5-year value close to $5,000; trialists, just $199. With that

data, the orchestras’ new mission became more targeted. The goal wasn’t broadly to reduce

churn but to convert trialists into steady customers.

The symphonies compiled a list of 78 attributes of the classical music experience, from the

architecture of the hall to the service at the bar to the availability of information on the

Internet. Using online surveys and other techniques, the list was whittled down to 16 factors

with the greatest impact on attendance.