Product

Product is the most fundamental and the most important element of the ‘four Ps’ of Product, Price, Promotion and Place which constitute the ‘marketing mix’. It provides the basic building block of any marketing strategy. The product, or in the case of arts organizations, the service which is provided has the dominant role in determining the nature of the other marketing variables. In the 1980s it became fashionable to talk about artistic ‘product’ and, as we have seen, the arts industry is ‘production led’ in a way which differentiates it from commercial marketing practice. But what concerns the arts marketer is not so much what is produced by artists, as what is available to audiences as experience. This chapter will address the nature of the experience of art from a customer perspective, concentrating on those aspects of an organization’s total offering which the marketing function can hope to optimize. It includes discussion of:

the nature of products and services levels of product product decisions quality

Products and services Marketing theory has been built largely on the experience of companies (mainly American ones) selling packaged goods in the 1950s and beyond. But there is a good deal of difference between the marketing perspective of

organizations like concert halls or galleries, and that of the makers of soap powder or instant coffee. Arts organizations (along with organizations such as banks, doctors and hairdressers) are providing a service, not a physical product. Services have characteristics which such products lack. Four widely recognized ones are (Bateson and Hoffman, 1999):

intangibility inseparability of production and consumption heterogeneity perishability

Intangibility Unlike products, which can be handled and owned, services are intangible. They are experiences rather than objects. Potential consumers cannot inspect an artistic performance before purchase in the same way as they might, for example, test-drive a car. This means that promotion, communicating the benefits of what is on offer in a way which is accurate and relevant, has a crucial role in service marketing generally and in arts marketing in particular. Another marketing consequence of intangibility, as we shall see in Chapter 5, is that prices are generally more difficult to set and justify than they are in product marketing.