Arts Marketing Performance: An Artistic-Mission-Led Approach to Evaluation

TLDR

Arts marketing has shifted from a functional tool to a business philosophy, and a relational view of art as experience places consumers at the center, making financial figures and audience numbers insufficient to capture its contribution to arts organizations. The article aims to evaluate arts marketing performance by measuring its contribution to the organization’s artistic mission and to propose a model for artistic‑mission‑led evaluation. The authors propose a model grounded in Kaplan and Norton’s Balanced Scorecard to guide artistic‑mission‑led evaluation of arts marketing performance. The study contributes theoretically to arts marketing performance evaluation by integrating the relational view of arts and performance‑management literature for nonprofit organizations.

Abstract

Marketing in the arts sector has evolved during the past decades from a functional tool to a business philosophy. At the same time, a relational view of art as experience has emerged in contemporary arts philosophy, highlighting the role of arts consumers in the creation and reception of arts. As a consequence, arts consumers have gained a central position within the artistic mission of arts organizations, posing new challenges to the role of arts marketing both as a practice and as an academic discipline. Against this background, financial figures and audience numbers are insufficient indicators of the contribution that arts marketing makes to the functioning of arts organizations. This article suggests evaluating the performance of arts marketing based on the contribution made to the achievement of the arts organization's artistic mission and proposes a model based on Kaplan and Norton's Balanced Scorecard to guide the artistic-mission-led evaluation of arts marketing performance. By paying attention to the new strategic role of arts marketing within the emerging relational view of the arts and by integrating recent literature on performance management in nonprofit organizations, we make a theoretical contribution to the body of knowledge on arts marketing performance evaluation.