The Big Tent Messaging Trap

Hello Hello,

In the arts and culture world, we’ve been clinging to broad, catch-all messaging for a long time.

The Big Tent Messaging Trap This whole 'Big Tent' notion and the idea that we must sound universal to be inclusive seems to crop up in every team somewhere.

But in actual fact

76% of consumers switch off when an experience feels generic and not tailored to them (McKinsey 2021)

Data-led segmentation can drive a 25% revenue uplift. (McKinsey 2021)

Behaviour over Demographics. Instead of herding everyone into a big tent, what if we shaped the journey around what people have actually done? If a patron only ever turns up for Baroque, why not honour that? Introduce something new only when there’s a genuine thread connecting it to what they already have shown they like. (I’m also a big advocate of putting in an outlier, too, so this isn’t black and white).

Some might grumble that this sort of approach is ‘not worth the time’ and they ‘don’t see the point’, but it is a longer haul that is relatively inexpensive and effective to build a tailored message that builds trust over time.

Before you send out that next mass email, have a think: is this message genuinely for someone, or is it just noise in the inbox that rightly can be ignored?