Is it time to disband the "programming" team?

(or, are we all marketers)

We were having a discussion in the office a couple of evenings back about the role of marketing in the process of programming and delivering a production.  I’m fortunate to work in an organisation that’s been recognised for the innovative way that it works; some of my colleagues have presented on it at conferences both nationally and internationally.

As an organisation we’ve taken the conscious decision to step away from the traditional silo-based approach to programming and marketing where one team books the shows and the other sells them; our approach is far more integrated.  Whether it’s discussing the themes, stories or issues prevalent in a piece of work at a show-and-tell meeting, identifying the potential audiences that might be attracted to works or they way in which we should price products, the marketing team are there, always and without fail.  Targets for productions don’t get signed off without input and agreement from both parties, neither do brochures nor many other marketing assets without inout from the prodcuers.

I’m sure there are other organisations that work in a similar way and the aim of this article is not to explore the various merits of the way we work.  Reflecting on the earlier discussion, I started thinking about whether we as programmers and producers might actually now be considered marketers.  This is the idea that I want to explore further.

My thinking goes back to the most basic marketing principle – the marketing mix.  Whether you understand it as 4 or 7 “P’s”, at its core is the idea that success comes from addressing all aspects of the mix appropriately.  To illustrate my point, and for the sake of brevity, I’m going to stick to the four “P’s”, Product, Price, Place and Promotion.

Simply put, in order to be successful you need to have the right product, produce and sell it at the right price, in the right marketplace and with the right promotion.  This is a marketing theory of which product, our primary concern as programmers and producers, is just a component part; it’s not the be all and end all – ultimately everything has to work in unison for the organisation to succeed.

When you look at definitions of “product” in marketing textbooks they tend to talk not about what the organisation produces, but what the customer buys – physically, functionally and symbolically.   This has to be at the core of an audience driven programme, after all, it’s the audience’s needs and wants that we ultimately exist to satisfy. 

As programmers or producers this is what we need to be thinking about – the component parts of any production and how it might be viewed (in terms of its location) by an audience (physically), ensuring that all these elements perform in the way expected by our audience (functionally) and what this experience will mean to the audience (symbolically).  The integration of programming and marketing helps us to better understand and satisfy the audiences’ needs when we start to create or programme products.

I’m aware that this gives an over-simplified view of how we as programmers and producers work, and our intention is to explore each of the parts that make up a product (and therefore our roles) in later posts.  However, this doesn’t detract from the fact that by delivering a high quality, audience focused package of each of these benefits to and with the marketing team, and ensuring we champion these benefits through the rest of the process, we fulfil our role in the marketing mix. This, in my opinion, makes us as much marketer as it does any other title you may wish to give us.

Does this mean that it’s time to disband the programming team?  I don’t think so just yet –there are still skills, knowledge and expertise in the delivery of product, and importantly the nurturing of relationships that facilitate this delivery, that need to be retained within a team of programmers and producers; however,  for me, the line between the two functions – marketing and programming/production – is becoming increasingly blurred.  As programmers and producers, both within Wales Millennium Centre and the wider industry, I believe that we shouldn’t be afraid to think of ourselves in this way.