Difference that makes a difference
"Differentiation" is the art of learning and leveraging the differences that matter to your audience
“Pare down to the essence, but don’t remove the poetry.”
—Leonard Koren, from Wabi-Sabi for Artists, Designers, Poets & Philosophers
If you’ve bought a “partially obstructed view” seat in a theater, or an “early access pass” to a museum exhibit, or a “coach-plus” airline ticket, you’ve experienced differentiation – the practice of using difference as a value signal and a purchase incentive. In arts marketing, knowing and naming the differences across your offerings, or between your offerings and competing options, can be a key to larger audiences and greater revenue (both sales and gifts).
Differentiation strategy begins with the realization that every product or service is unique in a bundle of ways. Different seats in the same theater on the same night have different value (orchestra, mezzanine, balcony, and the dreaded “obstructed view,” as examples). Even the exact same seat in a theater has a different value at different times (Friday vs. Tuesday, evening vs. matinee, show day vs. dark day).
Marketing maven Theodore Levitt (1980) writes that to the potential buyer, “a product is a complex cluster of value satisfactions.” The differences they’re looking for, or find meaningful, can be tangible or intangible, tactical or emotional, reasoned or intuited. In an infinite array of possible variety, the arts marketer’s job is to discern the differences that actually make a difference to the humans they seek to serve.
To help organize that strategic thinking, Levitt suggests four levels of differentiation for any product or service:
The Generic Product: “the fundamental, but rudimentary, substantive ‘thing’ that’s the table stakes of business – what’s needed for a chance to play the game of market participation…” For the performing arts, the Generic Product could be simply any collection of humans moving and making sounds in a shared space. For the visual arts, it could be an intentional aggregation of objects.
The Expected Product: “the customer’s minimal purchase conditions. What, for example, does the customer consider absolutely essential,” beyond the Generic Product, in any such product or service? For the performing arts, audiences tend to expect a building and a chair and perhaps other basic trappings of a theater or concert hall. For visual arts, this might include a relatively clean and accessible venue with room to move and enough light to see.
The Augmented Product: any aspect or attribute of the product or service that “has exceeded the normal expectations of the buyer” – the above and beyond, the surprise and delight. Think, here, of all the unexpected elements in any recent arts experience – a kind welcome at the door, a flower or thank you card waiting on your seat, a free snack, an unannounced guest artist.
The Potential Product: “Everything that might be done to attract and hold customers”; the adjacent possibilities yet to explore. Consider anything and everything that might enhance the artistic experience, the crazy ideas, the new opportunities of emerging technology, as examples.
Of course, these simple categories are never actually simple. As Levitt warns: “What’s ‘augmented’ for one customer may be ‘expected’ by another; what’s ‘augmented’ under one circumstance may be ‘potential’ in another; part of what’s ‘generic’ in periods of short supply may be ‘expected’ in periods of oversupply.”
And, in any dynamic industry, these categories will shift over time: Some market innovator makes a potential attribute into an augmented offering, peers and competitors notice and adopt it, audiences come to expect it, and in some cases it becomes part of the generic table stakes to play the game at all. For example, how soon after WiFi became available on airline flights did you move from “delight and surprise” to “why isn’t it fast, reliable, and free”?
Beyond these strategic considerations, differentiation also raises deeper questions about organizational values. As a mission-driven enterprise in service to a public trust, when and how is it appropriate for you to extract extra revenue for exclusive benefits? On one hand, doing so will subsidize offerings to other audiences. On the other hand, that journey can be a slippery slope that pulls you away from equitable and inclusive practice.
Differentiation is an essential tool in any arts marketer’s toolbox. As with all such power tools, it takes care and craft to use it well.
Photo by Raquel Martínez on Unsplash
Sources
Levitt, Theodore. 1980. “Marketing Success Through Differentiation—of Anything.” Harvard Business Review, January.
From the ArtsManaged Field Guide
Function of the Week: Marketing
Marketing involves creating, communicating, and reinforcing expected or experienced value.
Framework of the Week: Value Proposition Canvas
The Value Proposition Canvas encourages you and your team to explore and understand a set of customers, audience members, or constituents from their perspective: What jobs are they trying to do? What pains do they encounter in that effort? And what gains do they experience when they succeed?
Levitt’s mental map has long been one of the most important frameworks which marketers can use to think about product strategy. It is wonderful to see it here in your Substack.