Collecting data is great, but if you don't analyze it, it becomes useless. On the last post, we accumulated a solid base of information and data on the two professional ballet companies we will be looking at, Kansas City Ballet and Ballet west. This data will become the launching pad and home base as we explore other questions and begin to breakdown the data. The first item we are going to break down are the related topics surrounding these two ballet companies.
Association is a powerful tool. It can become either an obstacle or a catalyst for where you want to go. Sometimes, we don't get to pick what we are associated with and this is particularly true for brands or companies. For example, if you ask multiple people what they associate ballet with, you will quickly accumulate a consistent list; ballet shoes, ballet classes and The Nutcracker. Google Trend's data only confirms these typically associated terms. As we saw in the previous chart provided, under the heading of "Google Search Results for Company Name," the top results all had to do with ballet classes, auditions and of course, coming in closely to the top associate term, The Nutcracker.
The Nutcracker will be any ballet company's main money-maker. According to an article from Crain's New York Business Magazine The Nutcracker season of performances alone will bring in forty to forty-five percent of a company's revenue. According to the chart located below that documents the number of people who have visited a dance or ballet performances within the last 12 months in the United States from spring 2008 to spring 2017 (in millions), there has been a general increase in ballet performance attendees in the past 9 years. However, what is interesting is that the average between the spring (15 million) and fall (15.4 million) are pretty much even.
Over the course of 4 weeks, the Kansas City Ballet will perform the Nutcracker twenty-one times and Ballet West will perform it thirty times. With each company starting their performances after Thanksgiving and running through the end of December, we clearly see that this crowd pleaser only takes place in Winter. So how could the Spring be drawing in almost the same amount of viewers?
This may not seem like an important piece of the puzzle, but if Ballet companies were simply "one-act ponies" that were only relevant for their production of the Nutcracker, then success would be defined very specifically to the success of that one production. Basically, we now see that we can't attribute a company's success to this one association or even the success of this one production. We have to take into account the full year worth of productions and marketing efforts. Although the Nutcracker is what most people are looking for when searching for local ballet companies, there are other relevant topics of conversation. At this point we can eliminate both companies production of the Nutcracker as a possible outlier and turn our focus to their year long marketing efforts. What is working? What isn't? And even more importantly, what about them makes people care?
In the next blog post we will look at the topics of conversation centered around these companies. What about them gets people talking?
Sarah Donnelly
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