Engineering a Market

A while back I was watching a documentary about Ethiopia. A woman had a crazy dream to make her country a better place. Pretty simple idea really. Markets. In the 80's when the huge droughts came, there was actually a lot of food in Ethiopia. This was something I didn't know before. But the food was in a different region than the people starving, and there was no way to get the food from one to the other. There were no markets to facilitate that transfer. A lot of people didn't even know about it until way later.

I was thinking of that in relation to the arts. Currently there is a huge surplus of tickets to performing arts events.  There are lots of people looking for things to do. But the two don't often meet. Folks spend so much time on marketing without having an actual market, that for an outsider looking in, it must seem ridiculous.

One way to help Ethiopians was through a commodity exchange. (Granted there are many other problems but this is one way to help.) There were lots individual farmers struggling to find someone to buy their coffee beans. There were lots of people looking to buy those beans, but they couldn't meet each other. They needed a way to facilitate that. For agricultural products, a commodities exchange is the way to go. A central clearing house so all the farmers can get a decent price and match up with people wiling to buy their wares.

But before it could work there were a couple of things that needed to be created: the infrastructure to make it work, storage facilities, ways to transport goods, computing ability to handle the transactions, and most importantly trust. Trust was the single biggest challenge of all the things that needed to be built. If purchasers couldn't trust what they bought without having seen it, it would never take off.

How do you build that trust as an arts community? Not on a show-by-show basis or a company-by-company basis, but as a group. "These theatres can be trusted to do high-quality work."

I think that is the single biggest barrier small companies face to reaching broader audiences. A lot of people don't trust that it'll be any good, that it'll be worth their time.  For most companies I know, the most difficult thing in building audiences is getting someone through the door the first time. Not just your door, any small theatre door.

For all intents and purposes we're really not that far removed from individual farmers struggling to find someone to buy our coffee beans.  How do you build that trust with the general population as a group (ie NYC Indy theatre, Chicago Storefronts, Vancouver Indy, etc.)?

More to come