Building and sustaining a performing arts market in Cape Coast Metropolis of Ghana: A study of connections among universities and non-academic performing arts organisations

Abstract

The performing arts constitute a significant part of the Ghanaian culture because they help in cultural identity formation, knowledge dissemination and in representing the mood of a society. Despite these positives, most performing arts organisations in the Cape Coast Metropolis of Ghana have been facing numerous setbacks with regards to building and sustaining audiences and ultimately the arts market. Culturally, the people still assume that artistic offerings are a part of their everyday activities and must not be commodified even in the face of changing economic situations which had affected production costs, limiting organisational capacity to explore new promotional or marketing strategies for the building and maintenance of consumers. Thus, using an interpretive paradigm, I explored the current state of the performing arts market in the Cape Coast Metropolis, mode of audience development practices, success and challenges of promotional strategies employed using five performing arts organisations as my cases. The results revealed that the market was in a state of decline due to challenges with human, financial and physical resources, the unplanned nature of audience development practices and poor measurement metrics for strategies used which directly or indirectly rendered audience development activities less efficient. I recommended that performing arts organisation engaged in quality market research to understand the market space, audiences‘ needs, preferences, consumption patterns and barriers to consumption to inform their plan and strategy for audience development. I suggested a collaborative framework to audience development for groups to explore to build and retain audiences and the market.