The California Symphony: Explaining Aubrey Bergauer’s extraordinary success through the lens of business theory
Source: Southwest The Magazine via www.aubreybergauer.com
If you work in the classical music world, you’ve likely heard of audience growth wunderkind Aubrey Bergauer. Joining the California Symphony in 2014 as executive director, Aubrey brought this orchestra from the brink of financial ruin to vibrant health with jaw-dropping speed.
In just five years, Aubrey had not only increased the California Symphony’s audiences by nearly 100% but had also quadrupled the size of their donor base, paid off longstanding debt, and established an endowment of one million dollars—outstripping national trends on every front.
What drove this astounding coup? A self-professed obsession with the customer, a willingness to ask nonconsumers what they hate about the customer experience—and to make radical changes based on this feedback, and a new model for audience development.
Jobs to Be Done theory helps explain why this approach was so powerful.
What is Jobs to Be Done Theory?
In simplest terms, Jobs to Be Done (JTBD) is a business theory that illuminates customer motivation. It’s a transformational way to look at the world that centers the customer’s perspective. It tells us: Consumers ‘hire’ products or services to help them make progress in a particular circumstance. And that desired progress, in that specific circumstance, is what motivates their purchase—not their age, ethnicity, income bracket, or past purchasing behavior.
Created to address limitations in standard market research, the JTBD framework helps organizations understand the context around a buyer’s decision-making process—from their emotional and social circumstances and the triggers that prompted them to buy, to the forces that pull or push them toward or away from your product. A JTBD practitioner uncovers these insights during one-on-one in-depth conversations with real customers.
Why is the JTBD approach so powerful? Knowing the context around a real customer’s circumstance helps to make marketing more empathetic and more impactful. Plus, understanding consumer motivation through this lens helps companies create truly innovative products that are more likely to succeed.
As Clayton Christensen wrote, “Unless you understand the full context in which your customers are making a choice to ‘hire’ your product or service, you will be unlikely to create the right offering for them. You’ll just be treading water with them until they ‘fire’ your product and hire one that understands them better.”
Leveraging the Forces of Progress at the California Symphony
Understanding the pushes and pulls that a consumer encounters is a key component of the Jobs to Be Done framework. A customer with a Job to Be Done encounters forces that compel them to adopt a new product, and therefore make the progress they seek, as well as forces that hamper this progress.
It’s an equation that must be reckoned with. The forces moving the customer towards a purchase won’t succeed unless they are stronger than the force of the customer’s habits and their worries about the new product. In other words, arts leaders, you won’t gain—or retain—new audiences until you remove their anxieties or hesitations around the audience experience.
At the California Symphony, Aubrey Bergauer did just that. She sat down with their target audiences—Millennials and GenXers—and asked them to identify the aspects of the audience experience that were off-putting or anxiety-inducing. Then, rather than getting defensive, the California Symphony actually listened—then implemented a number of changes that most certainly raised eyebrows in the industry. They told audiences:
Wear whatever you want
Clap whenever you feel inspired to clap
Use your phone during the concert (on silent, of course)
Bring your drinks to your seats
Based on what they learned in their conversations with these consumers, the Symphony also made changes to their website and program notes. They shifted to customer-centric language in their website navigation, added a newcomer’s guide to the website, and embedded concert running time in the program notes and ticketing process. They also replaced musicologist jargon in the program notes with more accessible language, and shifted to concert titles that characterized the kind of musical experience to expect.
Did these radical shifts drive away the symphony’s core audiences who are familiar with a more traditional approach?
On the contrary, says Aubrey. “The response has been emphatically positive because everyone sees that the concert hall used to be half full and now it’s packed. Everyone, whether that’s new attendees or longtime attendees or the musicians on stage, feels the energy from a full house, and it’s just so much more FUN that way. And our season ticket renewal rates support that sentiment.”
Reframing the Symphony from the Customer’s Perspective
Classical music organizations are notorious for employing an outdated, egocentric approach that simply does not resonate with today’s consumer. In a 2020 interview with San Francisco Classical Voice, Aubrey countered this approach: “We don’t get to say, ‘Because we’ve been good for hundreds of years, we are good and relevant today.’ We don’t get to decide that. The customer decides…the people we’re serving [are] at the center of our work.”
This sounds remarkably similar to the imperative in JTBD guru Bob Moesta’s book Demand Side Sales 101: “[You must] reframe the products or services from the customer’s vantage point. Only your customer can determine your value! However well-meaning your aspirations, they are not enough to sell your product. People want to be their definition of best, not yours. It’s about fitting your product into their life.”
How does that play out in arts marketing? Instead of elevated language, ‘look at us’ messaging, and opulent imagery, customer-centric arts marketing uses real customer’s words to build trust, features content that is familiar and relatable, and creates relevance by centering messaging around consumer needs. It also aligns with how today’s consumers prefer to engage with and consume information.
After speaking with their focus groups, the Symphony’s marketing team made a conscious decision to overhaul their copywriting voice, creating pull for their product by writing the way real customers speak. They eliminated industry jargon and employed more casual language; they shifted from long paragraphs and moved towards bulleted points. These changes increased readability and made the Symphony’s communications more approachable for GenXers and Millennials.
Recognizing that the decreasing availability of music education has contributed to lack of musical knowledge, which could cause anxiety about “understanding” the music, the Symphony met their community in the middle and pulled in resources that their target audiences trust. They provided links to Wikipedia articles about their repertoire and curated Spotify playlists designed to help audiences become familiar with the music they would hear at the next concert.
In addition, the Symphony drew on popular culture in their marketing and strategy—collaborating with Youtube phenom Postmodern Jukebox at a 2015 fundraising event and sharing an open invitation for basketball star Stephen Curry to attend a concert when he and his family moved to the area. Again—familiar and relatable.
Meeting the Customer On Their Timeline
Another key component of the JTBD approach is the customer timeline. Bob Moesta describes this timeline as a series of falling dominoes that move the customer through five phases, culminating in the ‘hiring’ of a solution for their ‘job’:
First thought → Passive looking → Active looking → Deciding → Consuming
At most classical music organizations, when a first-time ticket buyer attends a performance, they are welcomed enthusiastically with invitations to become a season subscriber and a donor—a practice that was recently highlighted by David Rhode in How Telemarketing Helped Sink the Metropolitan Opera. In fact, no matter where they are in their patron journey, audience inboxes are regularly filled with offers, solicitations, and calls to action. But when 90% of first-time attendees don’t return, and first year subscribers are the toughest segment to renew, it was clear to Bergauer that this model needed to change.
With the California Symphony, Aubrey established a new model of audience development, dubbed the “long haul” model, which shifted the focus from converting ticket buyers into subscribers to simply retaining them. Rather than dumping each new audience member into their database and sending them every marketing and fundraising message the Symphony generated, they waited.
Instead of bombarding first timers with subscription information, coupons, or donation pleas, the Symphony quietly left on the seat of each newcomer a cash voucher for the next concert or a free drink, with a note of welcome. (It seems simple on the surface, but offering a cash voucher instead of a discount coupon is a dramatic shift in messaging from the egocentric “Please come back!” to the customer-centric “Thanks for coming! Let us help you afford another concert.”)
Finally, in a dramatic departure from the industry standard, donation solicitations weren’t sent until the newcomer had been a subscriber for two years.
With a detailed plan outlining specific steps for each type of patron, Aubrey’s long haul model laid out a process wherein a potential customer progresses in their loyalty:
First-timer → Repeat buyer → New subscriber → Renewing subscriber
Aubrey understood that rushing a patron along that timeline is a major turnoff that jeopardizes their retention. Her new model allowed space for the patron’s perspective to progress from “maybe this is for me” to “this might be something I’d like to fit into my life” to “I’m getting value out of this so it makes sense to commit to a subscription” and so on.
Yes, this new approach to audience development is a huge departure from tradition in the arts world but, Aubrey reports, it is more fulfilling, costs less (fewer mass mailings, fewer telemarketing calls), and pays higher dividends (in just three years the California Symphony grew their performance revenue by 145% and increased their contributed revenue by 41%.)
When a performing arts organization demonstrates this kind of success despite industry-wide decline, it’s worth taking a closer look. And if the changes the California Symphony implemented seem too risky for your organization, be emboldened with the knowledge that they align with a powerful, time-tested business theory that has sparked impressive growth for countless for-profit organizations. This new perspective promises a potential for growth that cannot be ignored.
