Love this Rach! I wonder whether you have both customers & audiences…in media & TV we use both.
Customer typically being the person who buys the ticket so it therefore captures how they feel about the entire experience as you say (including whether they attended or gifted a ticket). They are the person you initially have a relationship with that you then have details for to email etc., that you’d look to be a repeat customer. You have a responsibility to this person over & above a good performance as you need to safeguard personal information & use this information responsibly. You may also have a need to help build a stronger sense of “value” for ticket prices.
Audience would refer to anyone who interacts with the content you put on - that could be a person who walks past your marketing or a person who watches alongside someone who pays (they may not have anything to do with payment). Your responsibility here is focussed on integrity of expectations for what they see/watch and their experience of viewing.
This may be overkill for the arts as someone could be both, but I’ve previously found it helpful as you could have 1 customer but 30 audience members (who could, and you want to, eventually become customers). A customer can also be an audience member but it allows you to focus on different sides of experience and hopefully value both. I saw a play recently that dealt with exceptionally violent content - as I did not purchase the ticket I was not privy to the trigger warnings on the sales pages. The theatre did not have an appropriate trigger warning before the show (probably because it was a book adaptation and they assumed people knew the content…I did not). I spent the whole play in a state of stupor trying to manage my mental state. Had they acknowledged audience could be different to customer maybe there would have been an appropriate trigger warning for me. Then again…my friend could have said!
Maybe the question is how many people buy tickets for themselves vs. How many people attend who did not purchase tickets? How is their experience different?
This is such an interesting point - we'd definitely differentiate in a similar way in theatre, and whilst you'd assume that the booker might pass on the trigger warnings to anyone else in their party, generally venues go (or should go) to great lengths to make sure everyone sees them, particularly if the content is likely to upset - so I'm really sorry to hear you had that experience! Lots of recent debate about trigger warnings too, so something that people are clearly thinking about more.
Love this Rach! I wonder whether you have both customers & audiences…in media & TV we use both.
Customer typically being the person who buys the ticket so it therefore captures how they feel about the entire experience as you say (including whether they attended or gifted a ticket). They are the person you initially have a relationship with that you then have details for to email etc., that you’d look to be a repeat customer. You have a responsibility to this person over & above a good performance as you need to safeguard personal information & use this information responsibly. You may also have a need to help build a stronger sense of “value” for ticket prices.
Audience would refer to anyone who interacts with the content you put on - that could be a person who walks past your marketing or a person who watches alongside someone who pays (they may not have anything to do with payment). Your responsibility here is focussed on integrity of expectations for what they see/watch and their experience of viewing.
This may be overkill for the arts as someone could be both, but I’ve previously found it helpful as you could have 1 customer but 30 audience members (who could, and you want to, eventually become customers). A customer can also be an audience member but it allows you to focus on different sides of experience and hopefully value both. I saw a play recently that dealt with exceptionally violent content - as I did not purchase the ticket I was not privy to the trigger warnings on the sales pages. The theatre did not have an appropriate trigger warning before the show (probably because it was a book adaptation and they assumed people knew the content…I did not). I spent the whole play in a state of stupor trying to manage my mental state. Had they acknowledged audience could be different to customer maybe there would have been an appropriate trigger warning for me. Then again…my friend could have said!
Maybe the question is how many people buy tickets for themselves vs. How many people attend who did not purchase tickets? How is their experience different?
This is such an interesting point - we'd definitely differentiate in a similar way in theatre, and whilst you'd assume that the booker might pass on the trigger warnings to anyone else in their party, generally venues go (or should go) to great lengths to make sure everyone sees them, particularly if the content is likely to upset - so I'm really sorry to hear you had that experience! Lots of recent debate about trigger warnings too, so something that people are clearly thinking about more.