Measurement and Marketing the Boston Ale Theater

Measurement and Marketing

The Boston Ale Theater

In this scenario regarding marketing questionnaires at the Boston Ale Theater, marketing director Betty Lucas has shown poor judgment in the authorship of her questionnaire, the choice of venue of the marketing questionnaire, and methodology of her information-gathering strategy. All of these factors in combination are sure to result in improperly measured and skewed statistical results.

While the intern in question may be quite competent, this is no guarantee that this individual has a sense of what type of questions will give clues as to the audience the Boston Ale Theater desires and is likely to attract. The intern might simply ask generic questions about age and gender, rather than include other, equally important questions that are more pertinent to the focus of what the public wishes to see.

More importantly, the gender and age break down for the single show being surveyed may not provide a representative measurement sampling for the theater as a whole, but only for that particular night. A Friday as opposed to a Saturday night may attract a different, but still loyal audience. For example, Friday night might be a popular 'date night,' and thus might be more balanced between men and women 50/50, even if more women, in general, see shows at the Boston Ale during its Wednesday showings, and Saturday and Sunday showings. The show's location in the yearly calendar might even affect the demographic measurement of the questionnaire results. Shows that take place around exam finals in the college-student dominated area of Boston might draw a lower proportion of students, on a given night, even if younger people make up a substantial percentage of the audience on most weekends.

The show that is being profiled may not be typical of most of the shows that the theater puts on, and thus draw an uncharacteristic crowd or demographic balance. Even if the Boston Ale hosts mainly dramatic plays, simply to put on a musical will draw a very different audience than might be typical of the customary audience makeup, and the choice of a particular play may even cause some regulars to stay away.

The survey may also elicit responses mainly from those merely willing to fill out the questionnaire -- perhaps older individuals, or people seeing the show alone. This is not necessarily the profile of the desired target audience as a whole. It also might even elicit a substantial portion of individuals from out of town, if this is an uncharacteristically popular travel period, or if a local hotel ran a promotion for that particular production, for out of town visitors.

There a number of strategies, all of which could be deployed simultaneously, at Betty's disposal that would be better than the questionnaire under consideration. The first is, whenever a customer purchases a ticket at the theater, the customer could be asked for information 'to be used for marketing purposes,' such as age, gender, frequency of going to the Boston Ale, whether they were from out of town or not, etc. This would enable Betty to gain a demographic profile for different nights, for different types of shows, and even if customers for particular productions were more likely to purchase tickets at the door, before hand over the phone, or through subscription packages.