The Seattle Opera, Future Customers, and Demand Diversification
By providing teachers with a detailed information packet, he made sure students could prepare in advance before coming to see the opera. For example, the packet explains, for social studies teachers preparing students before a 'Tosca' performance, what context the opera's story carries within the history of Italian city-states during the Napoleonic era. It also gives English teachers materials comparing Verdi's opera 'Falstaff'with Shakespeare's original.
Lorenzo, in collaboration with teachers, had students write a response paper after seeing the opera (English class), draw the impressions they had received (art class), or write a report on the social meaning of the conflict depicted in the opera (history class) , so that students engaged and responded to the opera. (p.357)
The Seattle Opera (The Seattle Opera). The authors pick this organization as the most impressive at responding to demand diversification in order to grow future customers of classical music.
"Seattle's secret weapon is a set of performance programs developed by a former high-school teacher with an astonishing talent for moving people's hearts. The story of Perry Lorenzo is also a case study of how one individual's passion can spread like a virus, 'one person at a time,' and eventually infect an entire city."(p.355)
Perry Lorenzo taught humanities at a high school in Seattle. In the early 1990s he was recruited by Speight Jenkins, the general director of the Seattle Opera, to lead the newly created 'Opera Education' department. From there, through a 'product diversification strategy', Lorenzo built the most engaged opera audience in the United States right in Seattle.
The joint project with high-school teachers targeting high-school students — the 'future customers'introduced above — is one of these. Many of the current members and staff of the Seattle Opera are said to have been drawn into opera at the age of sixteen through Lorenzo's ideas. Watching Lorenzo's program, even before I thought about 'customers', what struck me most was jealousy of the environment in which those students could take English, art, and history classes connected to opera.
For younger elementary-school students, Lorenzo also designed a program called 'Opera Goes to School'. Artists made up of singers, instrumentalists, and actors visit a school for 1week, and together with 60fifth-grade students produce a one-hour 'real opera'. A week later, the 60students perform the opera in front of the entire school, their families, and local residents . By reaching out to customers beyond the existing ones, the program is credited with helping fill the whole Seattle area with music lovers.
'The Seattle Opera's case of future customers' and 'demand diversification'. I hope this story is an occasion to rethink the 'customers'and 'demand'of the organizations we belong to .
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