Philadelphia Orchestra Sounds a Sour Note with New Brand Campaign

The Philadelphia Orchestra, long considered one of the greatest orchestras in the world, is nearly bankrupt. It is little wonder. Costs continue to escalate but the audience has not. Attend a symphony performance in almost any American city and you will feel young if you are under the age of 70. The audience is graying and dying and donations are dwindling and orchestras are having a difficult time finding new devotees.

To make themselves more relevant to a younger audience, the Philadelphia Orchestra has embarked on a new campaign with the tag line--ready for this-- "Unexpect Yourself". That's right, the symphony, the bastion of high culture, has gotten so desperate that it has gone low culture, bastardizing the English language in hopes of drawing in younger people who think that it must be a pretty hip place. If letters to the editor and blogs can be a measure of reaction, the current symphony membership base is not too enthralled with the campaign.

The creators of this disaster is a firm called Annodyne. According to their own press release, Annodyne "utilized its strengths in digital marketing to create a campaign that cultivates and engages a growing and diverse audience that may be unaware of the Orchestra as an entertainment option. Annodyne’s creative strategy focused on communicating the extrasensory experience of attending the Orchestra with a unique positioning aimed at competing against the growing entertainment market that now includes options both in and outside of the home".

As someone who has worked in the brand and reputation business for a long time, the only thing I can respond to this is: "Huh?? I can't even imagine what my reaction would have been had this plan been presented to me. I likely would still be laughing or walking out of the room.

The orchestra is a brand. Yes, the brand needs to be revitalized, but not against the growing media options inside and outside the home. One does not choose a symphony against playing video games. One chooses a symphony against other cultural activities. Our selectivity process is more narrow than that. Has this firm really every heard of customer segmentation analysis and perceptual mapping? The symphony is not competing against all other activities. It is competing against "in-kind" activities within the same cultural category. That's how people make choices--not from a huge arrangement, but from smaller categories of choice. I would really suggest that Annodyne read some of the more current work on customer choice, selection and segmentation. No wonder they went for a "street cred" slogan--they really think that they are up against a wider selection of choices than they really are. The problem is the symphonic music, as a category, is no longer within the alternative selection criteria of most baby-boomers, let alone Gen X and Y and Millenials. You have to recapture the category, not try to sell against entertainment alternatives.

Annodyne suggests on their website that the Internet is a channel that has become essential. It is not a channel. It is a technology that has created and will continue to create social and cultural upheaval and change, as fundamental and the advent of the printing press. So, a group of orchestra leaders--most who have little or no understanding of the Internet--listened to a group that told them they they must communicate to the web-based generation on their terms. This was a disaster compounding itself.

Needless to say, the campaign has become the fodder of countless news media commentaries deriding it. How could a board of a symphony allow an ad agency to sell them on something like this? That, of course, is a rhetorical question because it appears that a desperate board turned to an agency that likely had some board connections that sold them on a poorly conceived campaign. It makes me embarrassed for the Philadelphia Orchestra. If this is the best that the orchestra board could come up with, they may soon be considering a new theme: "Stick a Fork in Us... We're Done!"