Background
The Barbican is a state-owned mixed-use complex in St. Giles Cripplegate, just north of St. Paul’s. Construction commenced in 1971. By 1982, HM the Queen presided at the opening of the core Barbican Hall, home to the London Symphony Orchestra. Three more years were to pass, however, before the entire complex was finished. Just over a decade later, in 1996, all the venues needed refurbishing again and the acoustics at Barbican Hall itself needed vast improvement.
Aside from the 1,949 seat Barbican Hall, the Centre today comprises two theatres, 3 cinemas, two art galleries; blocks of flats, landscaped gardens, an area of, foyers and public spaces (The Curve), a roof-top tropical conservatory, 7 conference suites, 2 trade exhibition halls, private function rooms and three restaurants.
The Business of Culture and Live Entertainment
At core, the Barbican is an arts and culture venue. The Barbican Hall repertoire has included contemporary music concerts, multi-media events (also termed “multi-arts”), dance, Bach cantatas, opera, and staged works. In short, the unique selling proposition of the Barbican is that it presents the most diverse range of high-quality international work across all the art forms. Even the cinemas present a disparate schedule of first-run releases, talks, silent films with live music, innovative animation, high-impact documentaries and film festivals.
Integrated Marketing Issues
Goal
The Barbican pursues a fair share of mind, of leisure time and entertainment budgets. That much is standard for any marketing operation, especially an arts and culture center that must sustain its “market franchise” with product that appeals to both traditionalists and culture “primitives.”
Product
The target markets of The Barbican count arts connoisseurs, businessmen, and university students. Being the largest such venue in Europe, it can also count on attracting domestic and foreign visitors. However, there is no lack of competition. For the rest of the year, there are no less than 332 major arts, music and folk festivals throughout the Continent, from Sweden to Crete, France to Ukraine (Festivals by Country 2). The lion’s share offers something exotic and unique – puppetry, humor, ethnic presentations in native settings – that the Barbican matches solely by importing traveling troupes from, say, Africa and Brazil. Elsewhere in the UK, cultural and entertainment scene is vigorous with folk, fringe and music festivals just about everywhere: Devon, Manchester, Wales, Scotland, Dublin, Jersey, the Isle of Wight, Edinburgh, to name just a handful (British Council for the Arts, 1). The lesson that sinks in is that the Barbican has its hands full standing out from the plethora of choices for both local and foreign visitors.
In the ceaseless search for unique, high-profile product offerings, the arts scene has plumbed the diversity the world’s cultures have to offer and explored rare enough collaborations with science. Dubbed “sciart”, one example was a collaboration in 2000 the amongst the Natural History Museum, young artists from ten UK arts centers and neuroscientists. The result: the art exhibition “It’s in Your Head” revolving on research into the brain (Pini 951).
Promotions
The Web site is a vivid demonstration of above-average visual appeal, comprehensive program coverage and addressing multiple audiences. On the Home page, for instance, there are five Flash slide panels (out of six image boxes) to convey the variety of its entertainment, talk and dining offerings.
Colors are predominantly Dayglo and the layout is deliberately spacious, two elements that make it more visually attractive than the tens of thousands of text-heavy Internet sites.
Couple all these with equal prominence given to the visitor registration and season pricing offers and one has a soft-sell marketing vehicle that delivers on marketing goals. It stands to reason, therefore, that just 60 days after going live in 2005, the site was credited with more than paying for itself, provoking a 70 percent increase in ticket sales over prior year (de-construct 13).
The site is certainly audience-friendly.
Priority is given to program offerings; when one tires of the “eye candy”, he is bound to see the prominently displayed links to theatre, art, dance, music and education offerings.
Visitors can therefore easily find and navigate to the cultural areas that interest them. Below the visual panels, in addition, there is a categorized shortlist of headliners, play dates and a calendar where each date is a clickable link to offerings for that day.
Innovation and Co-op Marketing
In the ceaseless currents of innovation that characterize the Web, the site already looks a tad long in the tooth.
Three years ago, the creative agency could not have imagined the prominence that YouTube, LiveLeak and Podcasts could have gained in such a short period. But this is precisely one innovation where the arts and culture establishment lags behind all other entertainment channels. And yet, it is so self-evident that a dance video or an orchestral performance Podcast would clearly resonate even with those who have been to many performances.
In any case, one ultimately useful feature of the site was to have been the extent to which the six artform marketing groups could cross-sell the others. Somewhere on the road to implementation, this very useful marketing tactic fell by the wayside.
Reason Why
Benefits receive short shrift on the Home page.
The interested visitor must navigate to an art form or business service that interests him before being exposed to somewhat meaningful messages about the Barbican winning customer-service plaudits, being “green”, and offering enough lush real greenery to re-charge the harried business meeting participant.
The institution is far too reticent about talking up benefits. The underlying theme “why not try?” that permeates many of the pages is so lacking in motivational force and so sophomoric – just like “our business is helping yours to perform” on the conference services page – that a uni student can easily do better.
Navigation
This is mostly straightforward. However, I found examples of pages – the excellent “Can I have a word?” resource for educators comes to mind – that ostensibly lies just one layer beyond the Home page but are nowhere to be found in the Site Map.
Perhaps, the Barbican counts on StumbleUpon or Yahoo.uk to help the harried searcher but that seems a distant possibility.
All in all, the Barbican looks trapped in an integrated marketing communications model that grows more and more outdated.
Annual memberships at a discount and registering to receive email newsletters are Web 1.0 marketing tools that need augmenting with video, podcasts and RSS. The site could benefit from some level-headed brainstorming centered around the vision articulated by MD Sir Nicholas Kenyon, “the beating heart of the City of London, a place of stimulation, refreshment, and adventure.”
The key to more inventive marketing, I am convinced, is to ask ourselves whether the Barbican remains an arts and culture venue or will its patent strengths enable the complex to gain traction as a destination for all of Europe?
Works Cited
“Art, Architecture, Design, Music, Drama, Film, Literature Events.” n.d. British Council for the Arts. Web.
“Can I Have a Word?” n.d. Barbican. Web.
de-construct. 2005. “Credentials.” Web.
“Festivals by Country.” 2008. European Network of Information Centres for the Performing Arts. Web.
Pini, Paula. “A meeting of minds-and a third culture.” The Lancet 356.9233 (2000): 951.
“Site Map.” n.d. Barbican. Web.
Book by a Single Author
Last Name, First Name and Initial (if given). Title. Location: Publisher, Year.
Wilson, Frank R. The Hand: How Its Use Shapes the Brain. New York: Pantheon, 1998.
Article in a Magazine
Last Name, First Name. “Article Title.” Magazine Title Day Month Year: pages.
Mehta, Pratap Bhanu. “Exploding Myths.” New Republic 1998: 17-19.
“Orphaned Cossacks.” 2002. Association for the Worldwide Advancement of Humanities. Web.