How audience insights helped a world-famous opera house succeed in the digital age

The Challenge

Bayerische Staatsoper’s main desire was to attract a more diverse crowd. In September 2021, the focus of the opera house shifted toward digitization and innovation.

Both culturally and artistically, the opera represents an institution that has no equal. But there’s no denying the perception of opera-goers represent an “older” and wealthier demographic.

Bayerische Staatsoper’s goal was two-fold: to increase the opera house's social relevance and reach a broader segment of society.

Although the company already had processes in place to collect customer information, it needed a more holistic and comprehensive approach to analyzing it. Specifically, they needed a way to take their existing audience data and translate it into insights for reaching younger opera-goers and non-visitors.

The Solution

The company decided to take both a qualitative and quantitative approach to the campaign. Specifically, Bayerische Staatsoper assembled a team of opera experts and data scientists and picked their analytics tools to put their plans into action. The steps they took included:

• Looking at past attendee data and interviewing opera stakeholders to determine how to approach their new audience
• Conducting audience analysis and creating segments based on affinities and social listening
• Interpreting data to understand opportunities and overlap between their existing audience and their new/diverse audience

In short, Bayerische Staatsoper began with a broad, big-picture mission and created its own research framework to figure out how to reach its target audience. Below is a breakdown of how they did it:

1. Assess current customer data and gather expert insights to guide research
2. Research affinities, interests and topics relevant to the desired audience
3. Analyze existing and new audience segments to uncover opportunities