Laidlaw Opera Trust’s Post

Transcript

Hello, everyone. So we are here with Severide, the director and partner of Polling and Public First. Hello, thanks for joining us. All right, Hi, good to meet you. OK, so you had an amazing speech. Thank you so much for sharing such insightful insights and data points, especially about the trends of where the perceptions of opera and young people's perception of opera. It's very interesting. I wanted to ask a few questions. About your findings So what are the main findings from your research into the public perception of apparel? So I think what makes this research particularly thing to me is that we spoke to everyone in the public and by doing that we're able to really explore the views of people who've never really engaged with opera in the 1st place. I think one of the things that we found that was surprising and I think quite positive for the sector is the difference between the difference in scale between attendance in the opera and interest in the opera. There is a lot of people in the UK who have an interest in attending the opera at some point in the future. And I think that was one of the most interesting things that we found and that. Dependency wasn't actually where you might expect it to be. There were young people, people in the age of 45 actually were the most interested in going in the future. And I think that was one of the things that we can take positively away from this as well. Yeah. And what were the reasons why, although they're very highly interested, they kind of were hesitant to attend. So we've in, in the report, there's quite a few barriers we're trying to draw out. And I think, I think what we found is that people are so nuanced and all over the place on this that that sometimes the findings are even pulling in different directions. I think it's, it's the things that we're looking at are opera being a bit off the radar for a lot of people. They don't see the advertising as much as they see it for things like the ballet. Musical theatre costs being a bit of a barrier. But more, more than that, the perceptions of costs. People have this expectation that operas were going to cost more than ��75 for 10 to and very few people were willing to spend that much. And, and in their heads they were sort of taking a risk if they were spending that much going to something that they didn't fully understand. So breaking through with that group would be important. And then the length of opera came up. A few times as well. People were much quite open to the concept of shorter things that they could less of a risk. I think they could go and see a short one and see how they felt before making the the big expenditure. Yeah, I feel like our attention spans as we go younger in the Democrats, I think is just shorter with TikTok. People in the groups were saying the same thing and we're speaking to them. So what are the positives that can draw from these findings? It's easy to focus on the barriers, but there are a lot of positives in this report. I think the the ones that really stood out to me were just how unique people felt the opera was. People really believed in that uniqueness of it. And I think it could be a double edged sword in the sense that people wanted it to be the big thing and they wanted to do it once, but it was a really unique experience and therefore people do want to do it once. They're not completely averse to it. And I think the other thing with the talent of the performance was really important to people. They really felt that. And we we have this segmentation, which I won't go into too much detail on, but it shows that. Effectively, there's almost a performance for everyone. Like the more that we ask about different types of performances and different ways of putting these on, the more that we really cut down that group who are saying, I'd never attend to, you know, sometimes less than 25% of the population. There's there's an opera out there for a lot of people, I think. Yeah, I remember you mentioned in your speech the traditionalists versus the experimentalist. Trusting so how can opera companies use this information to bring new audiences to the art form? I think and, and, and I don't, I feel a little bit about this because I feel like I've come with a report that is in the silver bullet and I've sort of gone here you go. Here's a starter for 10. See what you get to. I think what we're what we're sort of suggesting is that understanding the audience is really important. Not just understanding the current audience, but who could be the audience and the way that you put on a performance needs to take into account who you're expecting to come. I think we sort of we make a start in that. Correction and we say that, you know, there might be this group of traditionalists who are gonna come along, they might be older, they may be returning customers. But there's also this group who are interested in updated or, or different types of performance, who might be younger and might be their first time. And they, they would require different marketing. They were different ways of talking about it. I think that's one of the things we're sort of saying. And then there's I guess the sort of solution to when our findings are pulling in different directions is balance. You know, we're, we're saying simultaneously in this report that cost reductions are important because people are afraid of the expense. But similarly, the too much cost reduction and people feel it loses its mystique. And, and it really goes over to the opera sector to understand the audience and to push forward with these findings. Yeah, kind of finding a balance essentially. Exactly. Right. Well, thank you so much for joining us and for your amazing insights. Very, very interesting. So thanks for sharing with us.