Case Study: Understanding our Collective Audience

Challenge: How can we develop effective marketing campaigns that benefit all the festivals?

Solution: Undertake a thorough analysis of each individual festival's audience base and then identify what audience segments are common across the festivals thus allowing us to plan and target our marketing campaigns.

Project Outline:

In order to aid the development of a joint marketing strategy across the festivals we established the Joint Festivals Marketing Working Group made up of marketing representatives from each of the festivals. One of the first jobs of this Group was to research our audience base which involved a detailed analysis of each individual festival database. This quickly provided us with the following geographical overview:

Obviously the audiences vary from festival to festival but in general the festivals are dominated by UK audiences. Further database analysis was then undertaken using the MOSAIC tool. MOSAIC is Experian's consumer classification designed to help understand the demographics, lifestyles, preferences and behaviours of the UK adult population. Mosaic synthesizes over 850 million pieces of information to create a segmentation that allocates 49 million individuals and 26 million households into one of a number of groups and detailed types across both England/Wales and Scotland. Such an analysis provided us with the following overview:

This analysis ahowed us that Festival audiences are remarkably homogenous, drawing 72% of the Scottish audience from just 4 MOSAIC segments and 74% of the England/Wales audience from just 6 MOSAIC segments. The 4 target MOSAIC segments in Scotland constitute around 32% of the total population, a universe of c1.7m people. The 6 target MOSAIC segments in England/Wales cover just over half the total population, a universe of more than 28m people.

Awareness of our common festival audiences allowed us to move to the next stage: a more in-depth understanding of where these audiences live and how do they behave. Utilising the postcode basis of much of MOSAIC, we were able to map the core locations of these audience segments, as seen in the England/Wales example below [where blue indicates density of segments and red/pink high density]:

Understanding where audiences lived was extremely useful to aid our marketing thoughts but we knw we needed more detail, especially about the behaviours and habits of these audiences. Although not directly comparable there was also considerable overlap, in terms of lifestyles, demographics and psychographics, between the Scottish and England/Wales segments. By taking the top segment in each pie-chart above, we were able to identify a number of common characteristics as follows:

 Results

The final prioritisation of UK target cities was based on the quantity of the MOSAIC segment in that city and research on the issue of ‘wastage’ - being the ratio of non-target to target segment in any given location - together with additional factors such as the actual cost of marketing in each location and the ease of access to Edinburgh.

Such detailed audience analysis allowed us to identify and prioritise, for the first time, target markets and channels for cross-festival marketing campaigns. These campaigns sought to raise awareness and interest in the festivals, with the success being seen in substantial increases of 20% in levels of interest and 'consideration to visit' across our target markets - and a corresponding growth in the ticket sales and economic impact of the festivals over the last five years.