Congratulations to The Hepworth Wakefield, (above) on being awarded Art Fund Museum of the Year 2017.
Very well deserved winners of the prestigious £100,000 prize.
We have worked extensively with The Hepworth Wakefield for a number of years and consider them to be one of our most progressive and open minded cultural clients.
And we would like to think that we played some small part in their success.
The Art Fund’s website says:
“What a year it’s been for The Hepworth Wakefield – a 21% increase in visitor numbers, bold new sculpture prize, and an ambitious exhibitions programme including major retrospectives of Stanley Spencer and Martin Parr. “
We were appointed a couple of years ago to conduct an audience segmentation for them, when audience numbers had been declining following a successful launch in 2011.
We then worked with them to identify two priority segments, and conducted research into why people in those segments weren’t visiting in greater numbers, which revealed some very understandable and some very surprising reasons.
With insight into the target audience and understanding of the barriers to visiting, we did some Consumer Engagement Planning with the client, resulting in a radical change to communications (including stopping advertising in the Guardian Guide, considered by many in the sector to be a ‘must have’ medium.) Instead we proposed a technique that we call ‘Surrounding the Consumer’, in which the brand makes itself as omnipresent as possible in the day to day lives of the target audience.
The work also affected programming decisions, leading to the Martin Parr and Stanley Spencer exhibitions that the Art Fund article above refers to.
And The Hepworth Wakefield tell us that they can see the nature of their visitors changing, to reflect their target segments.
And from decline, their visitor numbers have grown 21%.
And so well deserved congratulations to our impressive client. Evidence that ‘Fortune favours the brave’. (Brave in implementation we mean, not brave in working with us!)
If you want to find out more about our work for The Hepworth Wakefield, or would like to know how we might help you in similar ways, do contact us HERE.