Mosaic And The Changing Face Of Arts Audiences
It’s a whole half-decade since Mosaic audience profiling first made its mark on the arts marketing world, and now in 2010 the landscape is changing again.
Back in 2005, London Calling was something of a pioneer in the sector when we first introduced the profiling software as part of our support for the Africa 05 celebrations. Then the main brief was to correlate traditional arts audience information with residential and ethnic-origin datasets, so we could segment up London and look for areas of maximum crossover between the two.
At the time I thought this was possibly one of the most exciting toys for grown ups I’d ever got to play with and now Experian, the people behind the product, have raised their game again and introduced a whole new version of their software, complete with brand new classifications that best reflect the social changes now happening in contemporary Britain.
In the short term this means that all of us who’ve spent the last few years thinking of our audiences as members of groups like Urban Intelligence or Symbols of Success have some re-learning to do, but the potential benefits of the reclassification far outweigh this immediate need to rethink our terminology.
For a start this isn’t simply a casual rebrand to update the same old groups and types with shiny new buzzwords. Life in Britain has changed considerably since the last major iteration of this software in 2003, and as well as providing more distinction in terms of the individual personality profiles, this latest version also takes a number of increasingly significant social trends into account, for instance…
An Ageing Society: The new classifications recognise the increasingly active and varied nature of our early retirement years and the opportunities this can create for engaging with potential new audiences. Combine this with an increased trend towards their favouring historical and cultural inland towns over the more traditional south coast retirement towns, and suddenly there’s a significant need to rethink our geographic approaches to targeting these groups.
Migration: The new Mosaic now better reflects the diverse and increasingly multicultural nature of contemporary Britain, and identifies both mono-cultural enclaves (for instance Asian Identities) and neighbourhoods which have increasingly embraced multi-culture through assimilation and integration (for instance Terraced Melting Pot and Global Fusion).
The Network Society: The UK has grown from 10% to almost 70% adoption of broadband coverage since 2003, and this massive transformation has unlocked a whole range of new social behaviours. The digital groundswell continues to revolutionise our understanding of and approach to audience engagement, and the new Mosaic works to identify how different social types use the Internet for shopping, sourcing information and social networking.
Impact Of Recession: Many of these new types have been directly affected by the current recession, for instance the group Active Retirement have seen their saving and investments seriously eroded, and the Professional Rewards type are finding themselves under increasing pressure to provide financial support for their grown-up children. Both of these types will factor heavily in the audience make up of many arts organisations, and Mosaic can help in the creation of new campaigns that directly reflect their current social and financial realities and potentially offer new ways for audiences to experience their offers and events even in the midst of a trend towards more considered leisure spends.
It’s clear that the demand for popular and increasingly sophisticated arts experiences is still increasing, and the ability of these new Mosaic profiles to offer further focus on the different constituents of our audiences can only be a good thing in a time when budgets are tight and the need to spend wisely will be one of the key priorities for the year ahead.
