The state-owned Royal Swedish Opera has a mission from the state: to reach an audience as wide as possible. The # of visitors to the Royal Swedish Opera keeps increasing, however, the audience is still a very narrow one, with only a small fraction of total number of consumers interested in culture.

The Royal Opera's challenge

• Identify their most loyal visitors
• Identify potential visitors to attract in order to broaden their audience
• Understand underlying drivers among loyal visitors and potential visitors
• Understand underlying barriers to the Opera among potential visitors that don't attend the Royal Swedish Opera today
• Find a common platform for these two consumer groups, that can serve as a basis for a strategy

The LynxEye Solution

Segmentation and Target Group Selection: Through a quantitative segmentation study we identified different "cultural segments" on the market, each consisting of culture consumers with different behaviour, attitudes, values and underlying drivers to "culture consumption". Once these were identified we were able to select target groups for the Royal Swedish Opera where the most potential for growth was to be found. Five consumer segments were chosen as the Opera's target group, each of the segments could be classified into one of the following two groups: 1) "core group" consisting of the most loyal visitors today and 2) a younger "expansion group" consisting of potential visitors to attract in order to broaden the audience.

Brand Strategy: Once the target group was selected the work consisted of finding a common platform to build a brand strategy upon, one that would capitalize on the Royal Swedish Opera's current strengths in order to retain core visitors with unchanged loyalty, while at the same time attract the younger potential visitors identified as the "expansion group". By meeting the target consumers in focus groups we were able to find a common consumer insight for all target segments to build the Royal Swedish Opera's brand strategy upon. The insight revealed how the Royal Swedish Opera could position itself in relation to other cultural institutions in order to broaden its audience while retaining loyal visitors, through a sustainable competitive advantage.  

Results

• The Royal Swedish Opera now has a clear direction in which to bring the brand, as well as clear guidelines for which how to plan market activities
• Yearly sales and sales/performance has immediately increased, in a very mature market segment, by 4%
• Clear and consistent consumer propositions that are aimed directly at the target groups have been successfully initiated and easily explained internally thanks to the segmentation