Category Archives: strategy

In the face of uncertainty what’s your strategy?

The economic, financial, political and social pressures playing out the world over (Arab Spring, summer and fall, EU sovereign debt, US Congress debt failure) do not mean we all disappear from the face of the earth any time soon.

These massive disruptions simply have become normal.

You do not need to act globally to feel the effects of uncertainty on your business. This is the time for organizations and individuals to re-evaluate their specific situations and build new contingencies, develop new strategies, uncover opportunities for value innovation. Your capacity to analyze, understand and adapt will shape your outcomes.

This is the time for the kind of iterative 360 degree research and strategy process I use in my practice, and others use in theirs. It is by examining internal and external factors and helping people evaluate various dimensions rigorously that together we can shape a powerful direction forward. More than hope it provides pathways for decisive action, grounded in fact and using built-in measures to recognize when course corrections may be necessary.

A few questions

Are your customers particularly stressed due to the financial market turmoil? Which customer segments are more affected and how?

If you are in the B2B sector, are you aware of your business customers current concerns and how you can enhance their opportunities?

As a for-profit or not-for-profit corporation how are you taking account of changes in your environment, in your customer base, among stakeholders? Have you re-examined the assumptions in your 1-, 3- or 5-year business plans, yet?

Are you part of an industry / a sector that has been struggling already to maintain a resilient customer base? Have you accounted for and created strategic responses to the alternatives challenging your products or services in the market today? Have you examined how your products and services are essential – or hard to replace – to your customers?

How are you perceived in your community? How have you been managing your brand in order to create value and trust? How are you evaluating your impact on your community?

How have you responded to the massive changes in consumer behaviour due to the internet and now mobile technology? How have you leveraged the new opportunities that come with online and mobile communications and what are the next opportunities?

These are a few of the questions worth considering. It’s in part the impetus for the series of thought pieces I have been sharing on value innovation in the performing arts, a sector I care deeply about. The process is the same no matter the sector.

NAC musicians ‘gave up their clothes for their instruments’

Awesome!

That was the Ottawa Citizen headline on the story about a NAC Orchestra Atlantic tour concert in Charlottetown, PEI. CBC radio covered the story repeatedly through the day, even giving top of the news billing.

I wonder, if the Newfoundland ferry had not broken down, stranding instruments and performance clothes, how many Canadians would have been exposed to the NAC Orchestra even being on tour?

This concert sounded like an awesome experience for an appreciative audience. Looking at the performance images on Facebook of energized, passionate musicians in normal clothes, I can’t help but think what a great brand builder this could be: The people’s orchestra.

In any case, congratulations to the musicians, administrators and managers who handled this logistics adventure with such aplomb and got the media story of the tour in the process.

Competitive factors: Live Performing Arts

The approach to competition and how we understand competitive factors is key to creating uncontested new market spaces. Conventionally, competition is understood to be within a sector: an airline competes against other airlines, a circus competes against other circuses, a hotel chain against other hotels. Each organization tries to differentiate itself in its market space, to build a recognized brand, to establish a value position that avoids lowest price competition. Competitive benchmarking is done against similar organizations, from tracking market share to share of wallet to brand mapping and intent-to-purchase studies.

Importantly, blue oceans – uncontested market spaces – are not found by benchmarking inside that competitive set.

Rather, they are about a leap in value for the customer and the organization. Value innovation. It’s not merely about creating value, often incremental, or about pioneering innovation, often on the bleeding edge where others may well reap the greatest rewards. It is a differently grounded strategic mindset that aligns innovation and value.

Competitive factors for the performing arts

Imagine: You are a not-for-profit venue with a 250-seat theatre in Toronto that presents new work and existing work in new ways. How about if you are a commercial 1,200-seat theatre with long runs of well-known shows? Does one compete against the other in a meaningful way?

Imagine: You rent a community hall in rural Saskatchewan and present music acts a few times a year. Or you are an independent (no label behind you) musician with your tracks for sale online, an active YouTube and/or Vimeo channel and you are working the house concert and club circuit to build your fan base? Where does your competition come from?

I’ve heard references to there being a “market glut” in the performing arts in Canada. No doubt, there are a lot more theatres, companies and artists making a living – or some of their living – by creating, producing and presenting performing arts. Yet, as long as attendance at performing arts events remains the top indicator for future attendance, I propose that this sector is not a zero sum industry where the ticket purchase is simply shifted from one theatre or one performer to another.

Rather, I propose that many significant competitive factors come from outside the performing arts sector where people can reap similar benefits through a wide variety of activities. Here is a thought piece that considers some of these competitors:

Outside COMPETITORS	Benefits for customer	Performing arts corresponding offer to customers
Movie theatres	Great stories, star-powered, escape to the movies, big sound, big screen, pop culture, celebrity culture	Great stories, live action, connections with live stars, star power, be an insider, behind the scenes, participate in creating the experience
Home entertainment	High quality in comfort of your own home and sound system. Anytime entertainment and discovery.	Live action, social connection, common experience, participation, discover new worlds and ideas
Museums	Hands-on discovery and exploration. We bring the world to you. Learn about who you are and where you come from.	“Times and Life”: Discover your world anew through music; soundscapes of our history, tell stories about who we are and what makes us so
Professional sports	Action, tribal connection, heroes, victory, competition	Get the inside track on peak performance. Access to artists. Backstage tours. Process of creating winning performances. Community connection.
Spas	Pamper yourself. Wellness, stress reduction, spiritual connection, body connection	Come home to the Symphony. Escape to the Symphony. Refresh your mind, body and spirit at your Symphony.
Cosmetic treatment	Improve self-image, de-stress, personal fulfillment, anti-aging	Come as you are – and be changed forever by the music, the show, the experience.
Restaurants	Friends. Food. Social. In crowd.	Socialize. Social capital. See and be seen. Entertain your friends at the symphony. Community making. Mix food, drink and entertainment
Video games, Xbox, PS, Wii	Participate. Action. Play. Social. Relax.	Feel it live. Real-world magic. Participatory arts experiences. Community building.

By no means is this table complete or even “correct”. It simply hopes to spark different ways to consider competition.

Today, we also have to content with the fact that a common answer to “if you had a free evening tonight what would you do” has become “sleep.”

The Value of History

The Value of Presenting Study is aimed at helping to shape the future for performing arts presentation. We could just look forward to establish that vision. It seems human nature to go from today to tomorrow; maybe that’s because we are best suited to use ourselves as the reference point from which to understand the world. However, in my view, a full understanding requires knowing something about the evolution that got us to today. It serves to avoid myopia and to build on where we have come from rather than inadvertently move backwards. (It’s possible!)

It’s good to understand the genesis of Canada’s very own cultural life to help it move forward in the next decade or so. Nation-building, international relations, identity-formation and export are all underlying Canadian cultural policy. Public funding of creative expression also holds all sorts of tension points, from discussions about “what is art” to establishing funding priorities.

One aspect of our team’s work has been to collect a historic overview, starting from the earliest times in Canada as we know it today. The document is a work in progress (if you have things to add, please add comments on the project site); we will update this file over the next few weeks with some of the more recent evolution we have gained in interviews and contributions from people who have been part of the sector for many years.

Studying the Value of Presenting in Canada

Spring often marks new beginnings. This May has proven momentous for Strategic Moves: I am now leading a two-year long, ambitious project to shed new light on Arts Presenting and Presenters in Canada. (Full news release.)

To do this major initiative justice, I have formed a bilingual, bicultural consulting team from Ontario and Quebec. And we have partnered with EKOS Research for the necessary quantitative surveys.

I had the chance to give a presentation and Q&A session at the national meeting of Regional Presenting Networks organized by the Canadian Arts Presenting Association (CAPACOA). This is the group we are doing this work for and with. This session was followed by a successful kick-off meeting with the national Advisory Committee on May 5.

Since then, I have been working on all the necessary start up activities from briefing the rest of the team and getting the work underway to researching solutions for a collaborative online space dedicated to this project to building the project schedule for the first year of research and consulting activities.

Canada’s performing arts scene boasts some of the world’s most celebrated musicians, dancers, actors and performers. Yet, the purpose and the work of arts presenters in building Canada’s cultural fabric, preparing the stage for diverse artistic expression and developing engaged audiences are little known or understood. In a rapidly evolving world, arts presenters seek to affirm their role in the creative chain coherently and with purpose.

During the next two years together with the presenting field across Canada and related sectors we will:

identify, understand and communicate the value and benefits of presenting for Canadians
envision the presenters’ evolving role in our changing world
raise awareness of the role of the live performing arts presenter in the creative chain, in communities and in society.

I am excited to work with CAPACOA, the advisory committee and the many outstanding people that work in the arts and in the presenting field in particular.

Storytellers of Canada Yellowknife conference

Last year, I worked with SC-CC, a national arts service organization, to develop an external communications strategy. This year, I was invited as part of efforts to build capacity and skill to lead a full-day communications workshop at the association’s annual conference in Yellowknife.

It’s been fascinating to design this custom workshop. Storytellers by definition are communicators. And yet, when turning the attention to communications activities for the purpose of marketing, raising awareness and selling tickets it becomes apparent that there is quite a different skill set at work.

I have been reviewing the workshop design and content with a storyteller who has considerable marketing and communications skills gained through various jobs and initiatives. Together, I think we make a good team to bring valuable insights, information and experience to this workshop on the 26th of May. An added bonus, I get to go to Yellowknife for a few days and experience part of Canada’s North for the first time.

Do you pay someone so you can buy from them?

Click to enlarge view.

I just bought some tickets to a Melissa Etheridge concert. It should be great – we are excited about seeing here live again.

Because the online ticket seller adds fees like a “convenience fee” – basically a charge for the privilege of buying the tickets – I went to the box office in person.

For me all the “convenience” of buying online disappears when it adds $20 to the ticket price. And that’s not all. If I were to buy them online I’d have to choose the delivery method: If I want to be sure to get them delivered, it’s another $14.

Sure, I can pick them up at the venue or I can get them by regular mail (i.e. no guaranteed delivery) without additional charge. But here the “convenience” of buying online falls apart: I still need to leave my house and walk into a physical venue. Today, there should be a free option to download and print the e-ticket, just like with airlines, and some other ticket sellers.

My actual purchase cost me $197.00. Buying it online would have cost $231.00
(Well, arguably only $217 if I pick them up in person; so I went to buy them and pick them up in person at the same time and leave $20 – or $34 depending how you look at it – in my pocket for another performance.)

Nonetheless, this made me ponder other industries where the customer has to first pay for the pleasure of buying something. I’ve come up with:

Credit cards – even though everyone has a “no fees” option these days, cards with fees are also still very common.
CostCo membership – the annual membership fee gives customers access to amazingly low prices on all kinds of goods.
Investing in mutual funds. The transaction fees are usually well hidden – OK, there’s a total lack of transparency. And there is a thing called MERs and they do cost you, also quite hidden from view.

Consumers pushed the credit card industry to include no-fee-cards in their portfolios. Given that many credit cards continue to charge around 20% interest on any balance, you’d think that’s plenty to profit from.

CostCo on the other hand appears to have found a working formula where the value proposition works really well. The fee represents a fair exchange, and might well keep CostCo in business. The whole business model is fascinating and it has made CostCo one of the largest retailers in the world.

As for mutual fund transaction fees, front-loads, no-loads and MERs – my feeling is transparency should be a given in all financial transactions – and I am amazed this has not been assured as yet.

Where else do you pay in order to make a purchase? And what’s the experience like? Does it alienate or bring you closer to the company?